"Copey"

When the young gentlemen of Harvard University returned to Cambridge last week, weary of vacation and longing to resume their studies, one of the first things many of them did was to visit the Coop (campus co-operative store) or Dunster House or Amee's bookshop, and buy a volume that had been published during the holidays. It was rather an expensive book. Much that it contained was already on the shelves of boys who read anything at all outside of the cinema magazines. Nevertheless it was a peculiarly desirable book. It was part of a legend.

The University of Nebraska was threatening to take Dean Pound from the Harvard Law School. President Lowell had made a stirring announcement about Harvard's eating arrangements. Leland Stanford's debating team was coming to Cambridge for a debate on Science. But none of these events could overshadow the fact that after all these years "Copey" had at last published his anthology.

The home of the legend that is "Copey"--and no disrespect is meant by Harvard men when they thus nickname their Boylston. Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; but rather affection, for he would sooner be "Copey" than president--is up a high but never arduous flight of steps, on the top floor of antique Hollis Hall. Thither, every Monday night of college for some 33 years, have swarmed scores of undergraduates from the passing classes. The room they enter is not large. There must first be a good deal of scuffling and grunting before all can be comfortably disposed on furniture, window sills and floor. Then cigarets are borrowed, matches found, pipes gurgled clean, and someone arranges the windows and door to prevent a draft but assure ventilation. Usually there is a search for a pair of eyeglasses, but as "Copey" keeps an innumerable quantity of these, variously ground for varying type-sizes and occasions, the search is brief and successful. A hush falls. Some one takes his last cough. "Copey" waits for another last cough and, if none comes begins to read.

Freshmen inevitably hear of "Copey" within their first week at Harvard, if not long before, but they may pass him many times in the street before knowing him by sight. There is nothing to notice about a little fellow of 66, as small, indeed, as the smallest freshmen, in traditional oldtime professorial garb--old brown overcoat, brown suit, felt hat far down over generous ears. But on a Monday evening, as soon as the reading begins, a newcomer understands what it is that has made "Copey" the William Lyon Phelps (Yale), the Henry van Dyke (Princeton), the John Erskine (Columbia), the Burges Johnson (late of Vassar), of Harvard. The amazingly flexible voice, its sympathies and humor its clarity, expression and power of creating reality out of written words, bespeaks "Copey" as not only a most popular and learned professor but a great master as well of that most difficult of arts, reading aloud.

Now that Dean Briggs is gone, "Copey" is the last of a vanished style in Harvard professors, in professors anywhere, for that matter. He himself is Dickensian, with his piercing glance to identify a caller or passery, his two bachelor rooms in the garret of old Hollis, his quick replies which from a less amiable nature might be crabhed but from him seem way and sprightly, and his remark in the introduction to his anthology: "As for Christmas Eve, it won't seem like itself if Mrs. Lowell stops allowing me to bring my book...." Time.