People of the Whirlpool by Mabel Osgood Wright
page 42 of 267 (15%)
page 42 of 267 (15%)
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of civic sentiment. It would seem that the Island's significant Indian
name was wrought into its physical construction like the curse that kept the Jew of fable a wanderer. Periodically the city is rent and upheaved in unison with the surrounding changes of tide. Here one does not need to live out his threescore years and ten to see the city of his youth slip away from him. Even his Alma Mater packs her trunks and moves about too rapidly to foster the undying loyal home spirit among her sons--my college has lived in three houses since my freshman year. How I envy the sons of Harvard, Yale, and all the rest who can go back, and, feeling at least a scrap of the old campus turf beneath their feet, close their eyes and be young again for one brief minute. Is not this the reason why so many of Columbia's sons, in spite of the magnificent opportunities she offers, send _their_ sons elsewhere, because they realize the value of associations they have missed, and recognize the Whirlpool's changefulness? "What would be the feelings of an Oxford man, on returning from his life struggle in India or Australia, to visit his old haunts, if he found, as a sign of vaunted progress, the Bodleian Library turned into an apartment house! "The primal difference between civilized men and the nameless savage is love of home, and the powerful races are those in whom this instinct is the strongest. Such fealty is _not_ born in the shifting almost tent-dwellers of Manhattan. "It was in the late seventies, the winter before his passing, that one mild night I walked home from a meeting of the Goethe Club in company with the poet Bryant. He and my father had been stanch comrades, and many a time had I studied his Homeric head silhouetted by firelight on our |
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