But there is no decrepitude of the spirit. Moons may wax and wane, flowers may bloom and wither, but the associations that link the student to his intellectual birthplace are eternal.
There is an original tendency in the human mind which is the foundation of the desire for property. We all naturally crave something that is our own. What lover of nature wants to be where everybody has been? It is an instinctive tendency. We want our own land, however limited; our own house, however humble; our own books, however few in number. Who, I pray you, wants to “wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at,” or be a member of a fraternity that is like an unfenced common for every slimy thing to creep and to crawl over? It is this instinctive feeling which has from the beginning been at the foundation of all fraternities of every description, and they have striven to realize this idea, though they have not always accomplished it. This principle of limitation strengthens by concentrating every association and every feeling of the human mind, just as the expansive gases derive their terrific power from compression, and liquids, by concentration, gain in pungency what they lose in bulk. It is this which imparts such magic power to the college tie, because the college tie brings and binds together, at a period when friendships are most ardent and sincere, and feelings are most plastic, those who have separated themselves to intermeddle with all knowledge, and unites them in the pursuit of all that can honor God, develop the intellect, or benefit mankind.
It introduces them at once into a fraternity composed, not merely of their own classmates and contemporaries, but of all the gifted and the good who still live in their works, and by whose labors they profit. The longer a man lives, the broader his views, and the more he experiences of men and things, the more he feels his obligation to his Alma Mater, to the nourishment he drew from her bosom, to the formative influences with which she surrounded him. Brethren, it was here we were intellectually born and bred.
“’Twas here our life of life began, The spirit felt its dormant power. ’Twas here the youth became the man, The bud became the flower.”