individuality on her life here, and she is apt to find it much as she makes it. If she enters strong and hopeful in a high purpose she will meet with disappointments in many directions, but she will yet find herself lifted by a resistless tide and carried on towards her goal as in few places outside. The very atmosphere is inspiring. It is as if the many students who have lived their four years' college life in the rooms where we now live had left their influence behind them cleansed of all but its ennobling part. They urge us onward, upward, by the love for truth which they gained here and which we are slowly learning. They bid us guard the name and fame of the honored place that did so much for them. They call us to be earnest and eager, if not for our own sakes, then for the sake of our foster-mother. They tell us that we are no longer individuals only, that our lives have ceased to be wholly our own. Every success, every failure, is for our college as well as for ourselves. We are members of a company that shall extend who knows how far into the future? We are links in a chain that shall bind our country, threatened as she is by vice and ignorance, fast to the unshaken foundations of virtue and intelligence. The graduate of Vassar dare not let her life be a failure. She is under bonds to succeed. She is upheld by the strength, invisible but mighty, of the many who have been and the many who shall be guardians of the gifts of Vassar.
Vassar College.
DEAD BIRDS AND EASTER.
IT was an Easter Sunday bright and calm.
And life—not death—was the glad theme that day;
The air was full of spring's delicious balm.
The maple buds were dropping on the way.
And one sweet leaf, with flush of crimson on it.
Fell on the dead birds of a woman's bonnet.
What say the bells at these good Easter times?
They tell of vanquished death and risen life.
Hush, then, O bells, your inconsistent chimes:
You and the dull old world are hard at strife;
For surely, when the crimson leaf fell on it,
I saw dead birds upon a woman's bonnet!
