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About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (March 15, 1893)
.THE HESPERIAN Ono of our students recently remarked that every other student ho met wore glasses. Whilo this is an exaggeration, yet it is a fact that proportionately more of our stu dents wear glasses each succeeding year. Hardly a week passes that does not sec two or three additions to the ranks of the spec tacle wearers. Now, this result is, in a great, measure, traceable to the bad lighting of the library, We do not claim that alt these defects of vision are due to this cause, hut we do claim that it is the cause in more than fifty per cent of those cases where the sight has failed since the student entered the University. It is a fact that many whose eyes are not strong are obliged to forego the use of the library at night simply because the lights are so very poor. "While we do not believe with the student who sarcastical ly remarked that one optician had donated the burners, while another paid part of the gas bill simply for the benefits sure to accrue to them from treating eyes injured by these lights, yet it serves to show the feeling of the students on this subject. If the library can be lighted by electricity, it should be done; if it cannot on account of the expense involved, give us only half as many lights, but let this half give a light strong enough to cast a respectable shadow. Many scenes darker than those described in General booths "In Darkest England" are to be seen all about us. One of the saddest spectacles which I ev.r saw I witnessed to-day when I en tered the University library and found some thirty literary students sealed around the tables, all busily counting words. There were among them students in all stages of the torture. Some were novices with faces still bright and hopeful, hair still golden, whose eyes sometimes wandered from the books as though their minds revolted from the irksome labor. Some had evidently counted a good while. They had become mere calculating machines. They never spoke, never raised their eyes, their faces were like those Dante saw in Hell, alike helpless and hopeless. Some were old. They had counted long. Their frames vere bent, their eyes were almost sight less, they had counted thousands of volumes, yet they leaned down over their books straining through their glasses, and counted wildly, mad ly, as though they realized the shortness of life and knew that the night cometh in which no man may count. - Whatever the JFehra&kan is or is not, it is certainly honest in calling itself a "Represen tative Paper." With an art column culled from popular art magazines, a literary col umn culled from the leading reviews, a musical column culled from the music journals, an athletic column culled from the athletic magazines, and a local column culled from the Hesperian, the JVobi-ashm is just as "representative" as it claims to be. In a speech to the students at Yale the other day, Chauncey M. Dcpew made the character istic remark: " What made the class of '53 so famous is that half its members went into journal ism and praised the other half. Ex. Some hope for the college editor yet. Ruskin said that bad art is only permitted to exist in countries where there is bad taste, and that bad taste is only found in countries where bad morals prevail. If this is true, it does not look well for the morality of Lincoln that such a piece of atrocious painting as the Lansing drop cm tain is allowed to exist. The curtain is cer tainly one of the most pitiable attempts at art that can be seen anywhere. There is absolutely no perspective, the anatomy is all wrong, the groupings are anything but beautiful, and the coloring is simply maddening. At the bottom of the curtain is this elegant though rather startling bit of Latin, "Sommum: Forts Vitales." I defy any classical scholar to translate it. If such a piece of canvass had been hung in an Italian town during the Renaissance, the most ignorant of the peasant folk would have turned from it with loathing, or, more likely, they would have torn it to shreds. It is almost time' that the Americans should discover that a man can lie and cheat and sin with his brush as well as with his pen or tongue, and that distorted art is an insult to nature and to humanity. Charlie "What made the old cat howl so?" Walter "I guess you'd make a noise if you was all full of fiddlestrings inside of you."