Campus Martius

“ In the Senate-house, were fourteen ancient urns, dug up as they were removing earth in the fortifications.
A little out of the town is a spacious field, which they call Campus Martius; and well it may be so termed, with better reason, than that at Rome at present (which is no more a field, but all built into streets) , for here on every Sunday, after the evening devotions, this precise people permit their youth to exercise arms, and shoot in guns, and in the long and cross bows, in which they are [Pg 238] exceedingly expert, reputed to be as dexterous as any people in the world. ”

“ We know it in Rome. Fill up my cup. I drink to the genius of the emperor.”
He was full of his subject, and soon resumed it. “Fancy the Campus Martius lighted up from one end to the other. It was the finest thing in the world. A large plain, covered, not with streets, not with woods, but broken and crossed with superb buildings in the midst of groves, avenues of trees, and green grass, down to the water’s edge. There’s nothing that isn’t there. Do you want the grandest temples in the world, the most spacious porticoes, the longest racecourses? there they are. Do you want gymnasia? ”

“ Statilius Taurus built the first permanent amphitheatre of stone in the Campus Martius. L. Cornelius Balbur built at his own expense a stone theatre. L. Marcius Philippus rebuilt the temple of Hercules Musarum, and surrounded it with a portico. L. Cornificius built a temple of Diana. Asininius Pollio an Atrium Libertatis; and Munatius Plaucus a temple of Saturn. Maecenas, who lived upon the Esquiline, converted the Campus Esquilinus, near the Subura, a pauper burial-ground offensive to both sight and health, into beautiful gardens, called the Horti Maecenatis. ”

“ There is good authority for believing that this city, at particular periods since that time, some of them not very remote, has been reduced to between thirty and forty thousand inhabitants. The numbers have gradually increased during the whole of this century. As it was much less expensive to purchase new ground for building upon, than to clear any ruins which, by time, had acquired the consistence of rock, great part of the modern city is built on what was the ancient Campus Martius. ”

“ The footpaths leading upward must have been a rather steep climb; but five years before the founding of the Academy an event occurred which was to make the ascent of the hillside not only easy but delightful. In 1661 Rome came into the possession of a large sum of money left to the city by the learned French gentleman, Etienne de GuSfier, for the express purpose of constructing a magnificent stone stairway which should cover this slope of the Pincian Hill, and unite for all time the Campus Martius with the terraces above. ”

“ Like Monticello, the buildings of the University of Virginia are those of an intellectual, a classicist, a purist, and, like it, they might have been austere but for the warmth of their red brick and the glow of their white-columned porticos. But they are cheerful buildings, which, individually and as a group, attain a geometrical yet soft perfection, a supreme harmony of form and color.
The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the Pantheon at Rome. ”

“ Spent the evening at Martius’ house, and took my leave of madame and Caroline. I gave Madame M. my copy of “Childe Harold,” a very pretty one, which she seemed to value considerably. Martius I saw again the next morning at the cabinet, and took leave very affectionately; he kissing me tenderly, after the German fashion. Ask Dr. Torrey to look in the list and see if Martius is not an honorary member of the Lyceum, as I believe, but am not sure. If he is he knows it not. The Lyceum has also been remiss in sending him the “Annals,” which should not be, as he has been a liberal contributor. ”

“ The result of being situated in a half-dead village, which was neither loved nor loving, did not make life at the Academy tame, but quite the opposite; for the boys were forced to find their whole entertainment in the Academy life, and in one another, and the campus was therefore a little republic in itself—a Utopia. Like every other republic, it had its cliques and its struggles, its victories and its defeats, its friendships and its enmities, and everything else that makes life lively and lifelike. ”

“ And it
was cruel that Thor, just awakening to the true meaning of college life,
striving to grasp campus tradition, and eager to serve his Alma Mater in
every way, should have so little time to mingle with his fellows. He should
be with them on the campus, on the athletic field, in the dorms., the
literary society halls, the Y. M. C. A. He should be realizing the golden
years of college life, the glad comradeship of the campus. ”

“ The significance is in the fact that students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.
If student movements for change are still rarities on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. ”

“ C. B. Sumner, who dreamed and planned and worked for the college, lives to see it established and prosper, its bare, single building grown to the beautiful campus and many buildings of the present, its student body increased more than ten fold, while his son, the youngest of that famous class, has for years been a valued and loved professor in the strong and growing college of today. ”

“ Instantly every one within hearing would drop his books—or his cards—and rush to the yelling group, which would line up in fours and begin circling the campus, the line ever getting longer as more men came running out of the dormitories and fraternity houses. On, on they would go, arm in arm, dancing, singing Sanford songs, past every dormitory on the campus, past every fraternity house—pausing occasionally to give a cheer, always, however, keeping one goal in mind, the fraternity house where the team lived during the football season. ”

“ Suppose it were up to you to get yourself invited to the toughest fraternity-house on the campus, to read the Bible to the men between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, and have everybody in the fraternity-house attend, and even bring in crowds from the other fraternity-houses—would you think that could be done in any American university? ”

“ Numbers of art students proceeded to the open spots upon the campus, and, with hatchets, cut out of the crust gigantic caricatures of well-known instructors. With the zeal and yo-heave-ho of lumber-jacks they raised the figures upright supporting them with props, and the campus became, as if by magic, adorned with profile statues of professors! ”

“ I know that I said Hertford twice and I finished up with All Souls, who only have about three undergraduates, so if they had rowed at all they would have been several men short.
"I should like to write the colleges down if I had a pencil," she said; "you rattle them off so fast. Didn't you say that one flag belonged to the University, but the University flag is surely dark blue?"
And then I had to explain that University was a college and not the whole place, and she replied that she knew so much more about Cambridge than Oxford, and complained that our colleges had very confusing names. ”

“ This is the tendency—development away from the campus at the expense of the campus. That's why, when you ask me would I wipe out our business athletics and our professional musical and traveling dramatic clubs, I say, yes, absolutely. I would have the limits of college to be the walls of the campus itself, and we'd see, when men cease to be drafted for one grind or another, whether they couldn't begin to meet to think and to converse. However, that brings up the whole pet problem of education, and, I'm through talking. Go on, Pike; tell us that we are, after all, only schools for character. ”

“ Florence and Lucile strolled the campus as other girls strolled. They cut classes at times. They passed difficult examinations with some credit. They reveled in the grandeur of the architecture of the buildings of the university. They thrilled at the thought that they were a part of the great throng that daily swarmed from the lecture halls, and were somewhat downcast when they came fully to realize their own insignificance when cast into such a tossing sea of humanity.
Marian, the artist, also had her everyday rounds to make. ”

“ Another million will soon be needed, properly to house our departments of Botany and Chemistry, and to provide a Student-Alumnae building, and sufficient dormitories to house on the campus the more than five hundred students now living in the village. We are facing a great crisis in the history of the College. The future of our Alma Mater is in our hands. Crippled by this loss, Wellesley cannot continue to hold in the future its place in the front rank of colleges, unless the response is generous and immediate. ”

“ I can't say that I'm altogether sorry to have had the mental training that University life affords. Nobody can deny that there's a difference between a man who has been at the University and one who hasn't. You've had a husband at Oxford and a son at Cambridge and you know that as well as I do. But still on the whole I acknowledge that Oxford and Cambridge are for the young fellows. When I saw Lucius pulling away in such perfect style in that boat on Saturday afternoon I can tell you it warmed my heart to see it. And Martha feels just the same as I do about it. ”

“ There is an increasing tendency, especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus. Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni. College authorities are seriously considering the many problems connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. ”

“ He could see into the rooms of the other
class dormitories, where the students studied, skylarked, rough-housed,
or conversed on innumerable topics; from a room in Nordyke, the abode of
care-free Juniors, a splendidly blended sextette sang songs of their
Alma Mater, and their rich voices drifted across the Quad. to Thor and
Theophilus:
"Though thy halls we leave forever
Sadly from the campus turn;
Yet our love shall fail thee never
For old Bannister we'll yearn! ”

“ Thor, and making a last effort. "You stand on the very threshold of your
campus years; everything is before you. I am at the journey's end—very
nearly, for in June I graduate from old Bannister. I never had the chance
to fight for my Alma Mater on the athletic field, and you—Oh, think of
what you can do! About to leave the campus, I, and my class-mates, realize
how dear our college has become to us. ”

“ But Marcia is the first freedwoman I ever knew or heard of to be treated, by everybody and at once, as if she had been freeborn and since birth in her husband's class. Martius has not brought this about, or aided much; he is a good enough fellow, but he has no social qualities; for all the power he has of attracting friends he might as well be an archaic statue. Marcia has done it all. She's a wonder."
Then he told me of Murmex: how he was already rated Rome's champion swordsman ”

“ Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches? or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,—'You send [191] your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the institution? ”

“ When a benevolent donor endowed one of these halls, he invariably gave it not only money, but regulations, and it was the existence of an endowment and of statutes imposed by an external authority that differentiated the College from the Hall. The earliest College founders did not necessarily erect any buildings for the scholars for whose welfare they provided; a College is essentially a society, and not a building. The quadrangular shape which is now associated with the buildings of a College was probably suggested accidentally by the development of Walter de Merton's College at Oxford ”

“ I cannot say that I was so brave as the girls at the college, who did not shed a tear as College Hall burned—I could not speak, my voice was so choked with tears, and that night I went supperless to bed. But though it seems impossible to believe that College Hall is a thing of the past, yet one cannot but feel that from this so great calamity great good will come—a broader, higher spirit will be manifested; we shall cease to think in classes, but all unite in great loving thought for the good and the upbuilding—in more senses than one—of our Alma Mater. ”

“ J. W. said "Sure," but plainly meant to leave the defense of the Christian college to Marty, who, to tell the truth, was quite willing.
"There's room for both, and need for both," said that earnest young man. "Each has its work to do—the State University will probably help in attracting most of those who want special technical equipment, and the church colleges will keep on serving those who want an education for its own sake, whatever special line they may take up afterward: though each will say it welcomes both sorts of students." ”