Word: tree
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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First, the domain of the newsboy is restricted to an anteroom at Memorial. Next the Senior Class abolish the holy office of chaplain. Now there are whispers that the exercises at the tree on Class Day are a boyish high-school sort of performance, not untainted with rowdyism, and there are students ready to assert that an exercise which shows us up more in the light of clowns than gentlemen might better be dispensed with...
...analogy may perhaps be fairly established between the exercises at the tree and the Mayday festivities and the Christmas games of Merry Old England. Now, with these latter observances is associated a certain simplicity and heartiness symbolical of national traits. Their decadence, therefore, has not failed to call forth the lamentation of all good men to deplore the death of the healthy vitality and social sympathy which these institutions at once expressed and encouraged. The case is very much the same with the exercises in question. Can any ceremony be more beautiful than a merry physical rivalry, such as that...
...fine conception the detractors of the institution admit; so was that, originally, of the gladiatorial games at Rome, they say, and point with derision to the actual exhibition at the tree. So much the worse for the facts, we repeat...
...that all individual force and manliness have not died out with the decline of some of the old observances which tended to foster these qualities. Civilization, it is said, has changed the form but not the essence of heroism. The moral of the omission of the exercises at the tree, it is claimed, would not be that the free, rollicking, glorious creature we know as the Harvard student has become a cynic, mounted on the hobby horse of "indifference," or a prig prating of "the true, the beautiful, and the good," both too superior to the common joys and sorrows...
...plea is made in favor of the ladies and gentlemen we invite to our Class-Day celebration. The voice of purism objects that the brutal spectacle of the rush around the tree, and the slobbering, and too often maudlin embraces of the Seniors are less likely to please our friends than to cause them to blush...