Page Two.
THE SALEMITE
Saturday, January 30, 1932.
The Salemite
Published Weekly by the Student
Body of Salem College
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EDITORIAL STAFF
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Managing Editor .. Mary Louise Mickey
argaret Johnson
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Poetry Editor ....
Asst Poetry Edit
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Society Editor ..
Sports Editor ...
Local Editor
Intercollegiate Edito
Susan Calde
Marion Caldwell
Martha H. Davis
I- Isabella Hai
Mary Absher
... Josephine Courtney
Mary Ollie Biles
Mildred W
Mirii
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REPORTERS
Phyllis Noe
Elizabeth Gray
Martha Binder
Margaret Long
Mary Miller
Zina Vologodsky
Elinor Phillips
CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
Kathleen Atkins
Mary Drew Dalton
Mary Pen
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Advertising Mgr.
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BUSINESS STAFF
Mary Alice Beaman
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t. Circ. Mgr. Rachel Bray
'irculat
LITTLE THOUGHTS
FOR TODAY
“What is this life, if, full of
We have no time to stand and
—William Henry Davies.
“Poetry is founded on the hearts
of men.’’
—Harold Monro.
“A garden is my soul, which I
Must tend or slight until I die.
Or as a mansion, to be kept
With all its chambers cleaned
and swept.”
—Gerald Gould.
PROCRASTINATION
If now, in the unaccustomed, wel
come leisure of the opening days of
the new term, we might have a
glimpse of the distraught and wretch
ed human beings that were ourselves
only a few weeks ago, we might re
solve more firmly than ever not to
be guilty of procrastination. An
overdose of work is never pleasant,
but a steady diet keeps students in a
healthy, normal way of living.
Now is the time to start afresh and
prepare each assignment soon after it
is given. The work itself will be
much easier if done while instruc
tions are accurately remembered and
other duties not pressing us ^or at
tention. Most of us need not so
much expansion of our extra-curri
cular activities as concentration on
our studies, in order to fill up the
spare time now allotted to us.
Later in the spring will con
host of pre-commencement activities
which everyone will want to attend.
Then, if there is no back work hang
ing over us from these present days,
we may throw care to the winds and
celebrate in great style. On the other
hand, teas and term papers will mis
no better than notebooks and night'
out. Now, therefore, we do well tc
decide against procrastination and
keep up to the mark in work. Later
we may be able to afford a touch of
Spring Fever.
EDITORIAL
{From The Carolina Magazine)
You stand upon a high hill as black
pine trees stick up into the red of a
winter sunset. The air is grey as the
ight comes on. And the silence is so
deep and so vast that you are submerg- j
. You are silence. And you j
breathe, for silence does not
breathe. You feel the very colors of
the black and red. The restless boy
"*• your side taps you on your shoulder
he eagerly blares, “The trees are
scrub pines. The sky is red, and the
gleam of lig’ht through the trees is an
automobile on the highway. Gandhi
will die, and what do you think about
the Japanese war ?” You double your
fist and measure the distance to his
chin. But you do not strike, for you
are a gentleman.
You stand on the ferry from Staton
Island. Manhattan is wrapped inj
fogs. You see grey shadows and great
buildings veiled in mist. The New
Yorker standing by you talks.
“That,” he says, “is the Stein build
ing. ^^It was built in eighteen hun
dred.” You see the ferry prow cut
ting through green water, and white
foam curls by the boat. “But it is
not so tall as the Empire State. It
is built of Indiana limestone.” Blood
flows across your forehead, and little
red lights flash through your brain
as you wonder if the waters of the bay
are deep enough to drown the man.
You are wrapped in the soft notes
of a violin. You are blind to the peo
ple around you. You are filled with
the throbbing of music and strange
dreams. The critic sitting beside you
whispers in your ear. “The music is
pretty. He gets that high note by a
movement of his third finger on the'
E string. The violin is old; it was
made in seventeen hundred.” The
music breaks as your mind’s little cog
wheels grate with a red shadow that
passes through them. You want to
kill, but you can not, for murder is
against the law.
You stand before “The Angelus.”
No, you do not stand before the can
vas; you stand with the two dusky
peasants in it. You bow your head at
the soft notes of the Angelus. You
want to pray. “And,” shouts the
guide, “on your right is a canvas of
Millets. It is a picture of French
peasant life. That is a church
in the background. It is sunset, and
the Angelus is ringing. The canvas
cost twenty-five thousand dollars.
Pretty expensive picture.” You do not
pray. You move through the gallery.
“On your right is this; on your left is
that!”
You read Shelley’s “To A Skylark.”
You are caught in the spiral of the
bird’s flight, and your heart warms
with color and beauty. It sings with
the lark. The words grow dim, as
you are ever dizzily and jo5'ously spir
alling upward, drunk on images and
the lark’s song. But the professor
reaches for you, and brings you back
to earth. “That,” he says, “i
phor. Shelley’s rhyme scheme is ab
ab cc. The poem was written in
1820.” Your heart turns black as it
throws up both hands and utters, “O
my God!”
IP € IE T IR y
PRAYER FOR A LITTLE THE THREE KINGS’ ROAD
BOY
B\- Winifred Woods
Do you remember, God,
My little boy on the stair—
The way his blue eyes glowed at me—
The sunlight on his hair?
Do you recall the thing he asked—
“Mother, will God come soon
And strike a sunbeam for a match
To light the yellow moon?”
“I hope when I am dead,” he said,
“He’ll let me come out one night
And let me strike a little match—
And light a little light!”
I’m all alone on the stair to-night,
And the sun has set afar—•
God—keep that faith in my baby’s
eyes—
Let him light a little star!
—The Free Press, De.troit.
LIFE
To live over the richness of life.
Never fully lived;
To see it all, as from a window that
looks
Upon a garden of flowers and distant
hills.
From which your broken body
barred . . .
O life, O unutterable beauty.
To leave you, knowing that you we
never loved enough.
Wishing to love you all over
With all the soul’s wise will!
—Edgar Lee Mastei
By Anna Blake Mezquida
When all the tinsel has been laid away.
The tree is stripped, the fevered
rush is past—
You still have trees, a hill, a child at
play.
And love, and prayer, and fadeless
things that last.
Wear your proud purple underneath
Touch hand with one who travels
lone, afar!
Brave your dark night and walk the
Three Kings’ road
To find your Christ beneath his
lovely star.
He loves, I know, our pretty baubled
Our busy shops, our laughter young
and gay,
Our ribboned gifts—have we no gifts
but these?
No bright, red wreaths except for
Christmas day?
Though broken is some toy beneath
your feet.
Some dear illusion shattered,
grown dim—•
The Three Kings’ road goes by yo
dusty street
That leads up to a star—and Hii
—Good Housekeeping, New York.
WINDS
High above the world—above the
rushing, greedy, self-centered world.
In front of me stretches the grey-
green sea, ruffled only by tiny wave
lets. Behind me rises a wilderness of
rocks, dotted by an occasional flower.
Above the sky is bluer than blue. It
is a new born sky that is not blotted
by a single cloud.
I stand on the cliff with the life-
giving wind rushing through my hair,
brushing my cheeks with a million
touchless fingers. It wraps itself
around me, taking me from the real
into the land of fancy. I float with
the gulls in the blue. The sea smells
of mystery. The lap of the water is far
away music. I am not I. I am u
realness in the unreal.
—Kathleen Adkins.
Teacher: “If a number of cattle
called a herd, and a number of sheep
is called a flock, what would a r
her of camels be called?”
Little Johnny: “A carton.”
Week-End Travels
In the Realms of Gold
"Much Have I Traveled in the Realms of Gold”
1. Galsworthy, John. Maid in Waiting. 362 p., $2.50 Scribner.
This novel appears four years after the last novel of the Forsyte
series, and attains, (although with a dimmer irony and a restrained
humor, the vivid picturization and keen analysis of his Forsyte epic).
Mr. Galsworthy himself admits that his plot has a tinge of the films,
but even through this obvious handicap, his expert technique supplies
the reader with Mr. Galsworthy’s familiar attacks on morals and
manners. The heroine is another true English type.
{Extracts—Book Review Digest)
2. Masters, Edgar Lee, The Open Sea, 302 p.. The Macmillian Co.,
New York.
“Well, this life
Was neither virtue, glory, fame, nor study,
, . But it was life, and life that did not slay
A Caesar for a word like Liberty.”
The author speaks of “that famous love-affair” in such a tone,
and neither defends nor acclaims it, but simply and vividly describes it,
in his Brutus. If' no other poem in The Open Sea were worthy of a
second thought, this one would surely be. Masters’ style is simplicity
itself, alive, straightforward with few diversions and simple diction.
His ideas are those of a philosopher. ■ Thus he ends his poetic
story of Brutus and Anthony: “Marc Anthony lived happier than
Brutus and left the old world happier for his life than Brutus left it.”
His smiles and metaphors are original and descriptive. Blank
verse, with an epic rythm characterizes his poetry. Neat are his topics
for discussion. (You see! Merely reading him, leaves the reviewer
with a tend to make his words flow musically!) “This is the man who
slew the slayer of the noble Lincoln.” To wax poetic over the burial
of a madman is to leave a bit of a bewildered impression in the mind
of the reader. Masters’ seems to have done this.
Lastly the author makes tht inevitable and conventional gesture
expected of poets. He writes of Nature:
“This is the dole
And tragedy of man: he has outgrown
His kinship with the beasts that kept him whole.
Through thought, which is not instinct, but would own
The unerring realm of instinct.”
“You give us rest
Among the mountains, meadows, and unclown
Our idiot brows, and on your infinite breast
Rock us eternally under the infinite sky.”
(Ed. Note: The quotations are to make you want to read The
Sea-)
Hansman, Lawrence, Little Plays of Saint Francis, 287 p., Jona
than Cape and Harrison Smith, 139 East 46th Street, New York.
Many of the incidents around which these plays were written are
purely imaginary, or rest lightly and any actual record of events. The
plays are based on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose history, as
we know it, is as much legendary as true. But the book is written for
the dramatist, not the scholar, and whatever of legendary material the
author has used has been for the purpose of giving life to his subject and
drama to his story.
“Not all of these plays are intended primarly for the stage—not
at least for the stage as it exists today—.” They have been subject to
the criticism of the reader before they have reached the eye of the
observer. Nevertheless, they were written with an eye to stage ef
fect? and technique. In their shortness of length and simplicity of de
mand for dramatic experience, they will appeal forcefully to the Little
Theatre organizations and most of all, to the Church, which has so long
forgotten the medium of e.xpression through drama.
(Author’s preface, and preface by Harley Granville-Barker).
Open
THE TALE OF THE
STANDING-UP
ROCK
In the southwestern part of “ole
Virginie” there exists one of Mother
Nature’s most curious phenomena.
There, amid the rolling plateaus and
the fertile lowlands, is the meeting-
place of two of America’s greatest
mountain ranges. The Alleghany
Mountains, running directly south
from Pennsylvania through West Vir
ginia, literally bump into the Blue
Ridge Mountains which border south
ern Virginia, Tennessee, and the
Carolinas. There is no break be
tween these two great ranges, no im
aginary line, no marker—except one,
and that a man-made marker.
On a clear day a passenger on the
southbound train that leaves Roanoke,
Virginia, may look across the fertile
Shenandoah Valley toward the West
and see the intermingling of the Alle
ghany and the Blue Ridge mountain
ranges. The glowing sunset casts its
rose-tinted hues on the wooded peaks
contrasting them with the aquamarine
sky above. As the sun sinks lower,
the passengers may see—standing up
right in the semi-pass, a bleached mar
ble stone, which seems to glow mys
teriously in its whiteness. This stone
marker is about the size of an unusully
tall man. A guardian of the ranges,
it overlooks the cultivated plains on
both sides of the mountains, menac
ingly, as though the stone image were
protecting its own.
Travellers and sight-seers wonder
about this curious spectacle and ask the
negro workers in the section about it.
But the colored neighbors will not talk
about it; if it were up to them, the
Tale of the Standing-Up Rock would
never be told. The negro workers ig
nore the questions of the passers-by
and keep right on with their ceaseless
work of cultivating the fields until it
is pitch dark. Observant travellers
notice this curious custom of the
“nigger” inhabitants of working until
night without stopping for supper, and
may connect this with the curious
marker.
This is the Tale of the Standing-
Up Rock, as it was told to me by an
inn-keeper at a nearby town.
Long ago in that fertile section of
Southwestern Virginia in the pre-
Civil War days, there lived a man
who owned the entire farming section
on both sides of the mountain as far
as the eye could see. This man, who
in his youth had resembled a moun
tain giant in stature and in strength,
had grown to resemble a mountain
lion in his temperament in his later
years. A tireless worker himself, he
worked his slaves almost beyond their
endurance. He was the typical slave-
driver that almost all Northerners of
the period pictured all Southerners to
be. A rope-lash in his hand, this man
j would go from one side of the moun
tain to the other on his white steed
once every day. The remainder of
the day he spent on the pass between
the Alleghany and the Blue Ridge
ranges, where his presence would in
spire (or rather frighten) his slaves
on both plantations to work desperate
ly, continually, in fear of the lash of
their master’s whip.
This man, the Terror of the Coun
tryside, often said that when he died
he intended to bring down a curse
upon any of his slave-workers that did
not do their work well or that loafed
Before long, this man was stricken
with paralysis and was confined to his
bed during a protracted illness. Dur
ing the three months when his spirit
lingered on earth and hesitated be
tween earth and Heaven (or Hades),
his slaves worked continually. Not a
slave attempted to loaf or to escape.
One icy night in November, the
land-owner died. For a day his body
lay in state in the cold parlor of the
spacious farm-house, while the few
white friends of the man looked at him
with compassion, and while the slaves
stopped their work for a moment to
file around the bier and shudder as
they looked at the face of their master,
which was no colder in death than in
life.
The next morning the negro slaves
heard that the master’s body had com
pletely disappeared during the night.