IMPRESSIONS VS. CONFESSIONS

The Graduate of a Smaller College who has pleased us with his Graduate Student's Impressions of Harvard in the Christmas issue of the Alumni Bulletin has written in sharp contrast to the Confessions of Mr. Stearns who has used the Forum to stir our wrath. The Graduate Student writes delightfully and flatteringly of our University; yet he has found room for faults which have been impressed on him. With a freshness and toleration, the antithesis of the sourness and personal tone of the Confessions, the Impressions satisfy us, but still sound a warning against the unnatural and artificial indifference which seems to hover over us like a threatening cloud. They make a just, though silent, plea for the spontaneous.

The Graduate Student probably expected that the epithet which he applied to the CRIMSON would excite the ire of this "long-faced periodical." But if he will take "Oh, pueri!" to Mr. Copeland and "This is college life, this is" to someone who saw the Follies, we are sure that he will discover that we cried out, not against the "wholesome youthfulness" of the resurrected Rinehart episode, but rather in that very spirit of toleration and amusement that he has himself assumed.

The logic of the Graduate Student's assertion that the Freshman Dormitories will be a monument to the snobbishness which still exists in healthy vigor is obscure. Perhaps he means that they will be a gravestone to the vice; and we think they will.

There is more than this in the Impressions and plenty to make them pleasant reading for any Harvard man. But what satisfies most of all is their enthusiasm.