The four years spent at college by an intelligent boy—please notice that I say intelligent—are well spent indeed. They are gloriously worth while. You said that you have had a wonderful time. Not so wonderful as you think. It is a strange feeling that we have about our college years. We all believe that they are years of unalloyed happi¬ ness, and the further we leave them behind the more perfect they seem. As a matter of fact, few undergraduates are truly happy. They are going through a period of storm and stress; they are torn by Weltschmerz. Show me a nineteen-year-old boy who is perfectly happy and you show me an idiot. I rarely get a cheerful theme except from freshmen. Nine tenths of them are expressions of deep con¬ cern and distress. A boy’s college years are the years when he finds out that life isn’t what he thought it, and the finding out is a painful experi¬ ence. He discovers that he and his fellows are made of very brittle day: usually he loathes himself; often he loathes his fellows.
“College isn’t the Elysium that it is painted in stories and novels, but I feel sorry for any intelligent man who did n’t have the opportunity to go to col¬ lege. There is something beautiful about one’s college days, something that one treasures all his life. As we grow older, we forget the hours of storm and stress, the class-room humiliations, the terror of examinations, the awful periods of doubt
