learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the
best words of the best men for holy days,--all are here. No wonder
that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days,
the romantic period of youth. No wonder that Dr. Holmes's poems
to his Harvard classmates find an echo in college reunions
everywhere; and gray-haired men, who outside the narrowing circle
of home have not heard their first names for years, remain Bill
and Joe and John and George to college comrades, even if unseen
for more than a generation.

Yet a girl should go to college not merely to obtain four happy
years but to make a second gain, which is often overlooked, and
is little understood even when perceived; I mean a gain in health.
The old notion that low vitality is a matter of course with women;
that to be delicate is a mark of superior refinement, especially
in well-to-do families; that sickness is a dispensation of
Providence,--these notions meet with no acceptance in college.
Years ago I saw in the mirror frame of a college freshman's room
this little formula: "Sickness is carelessness, carelessness is
selfishness, and selfishness is sin." And I have often noticed
among college girls an air of humiliation and shame when obliged
to confess a lack of physical vigor, as if they were convicted of
managing life with bad judgment, or of some moral delinquency.
With the spreading scientific conviction that health is a matter
largely under each person's control, that even inherited tendencies
to disease need not be allowed to run their riotous course unchecked,
there comes an earnest purpose to be strong and free. Fascinating
fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored; possibilities of
doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new and dear
friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and work,