Open Letter.

I notice the debate has re-opened as to whether or not seniors shall wear the cap and gown at graduation. May I suggest another point in regard to Class Day? It apparently must be brought up now, before the senior elections, or not at all. For four successive years, to speak within my personal experience, the exercises around the tree have ended in a pitiable anticlimax, - not to call it a farce. I refer, of course, to the class song.

Is there hope of anything better, while the present arrangement lasts? Waiving all question as to the average quality of the words and music produced, there seems to be an inseparable difficulty at the outset: men cannot find time to attend the rehearsals. The natural consequence was well illustrated by my own class. It is within bounds to say that half of us had never looked at the song before we were huddled together, hot and excited, to flounder through it at sight. Moreover, even were the difficulty overcome - even if every senior had learned his part and sang - there are two reasons why the result would be ineffective. In the first place, the volume of sound - in the open air with a full brass band to contend against - could never be more than respectable, never impressive. It never has been even respectable, in point of fact. And secondly the moment is one for retrospect and remembrance; it is the last time that a class, as a college class, meets together in public. A new song, to which no associations can by any chance cling, is peculiarly inappropriate.

Is not the simplest plan the best, even though it might abolish the class chorister? If one looks at the first four lines of "Fair Harvard," one is struck by their singular fitness for this particular occasion:

"Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng,

And with blessings surrender thee o'er

By these festival rites, from the age that is gone

To the age that is coming before."

The tune is not one that we make too much of; because it is used for new words in the morning, at Sanders Theatre, there is no reason why it should not be used again, to the familiar words, in the afternoon. Moreover, it is a tune that gains peculiarly by added volume of sound. As a matter of course, not only the seniors would sing it, but the other classes and the graduates would rise and join in. This would make a chorus of a thousand voices As anyone knows who attended the under-graduate exercises at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1886, the result would be no anti-climax. It would be a revelation of the power that lies in one college song, when it is given as it should be, to stir one's pulses.