Poetry

THE LARGER COLLEGE.

Joaquin Miller


  • ON LAYING THE COLLEGE CORNER-STONE.

  • Where San Diego seas are warm,
  • Where winter winds from warm Cathay
  • Sing sibilant, where blossoms swarm
  • With Hybla's bees, we come to lay
  • This tribute of the truest, best,
  • The warmest daughter of the West.

  • Here Progress plants her corner-stone
  • Against this warm, still, Cortez wave.
  • In ashes of the Aztec's throne,
  • In tummals of the Toltec's grave,
  • We plant this stone, and from the sod
  • Pick painted fragments of his god.

  • Here Progress lifts her torch to teach
  • God's pathway through the pass of care;
  • Her altar-stone Balboa's Beach,
  • Her incense warm, sweet, perfumed air;
  • Such incense! where white strophes reach
  • And lap and lave Balboa's Beach!

  • We plant this stone as some small seed
  • Is sown at springtime, warm with earth;
  • *ow this seed as some good deed
  • sown, to grow until its worth
  • Shall grow, through rugged steeps of time
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  • Retouch the god-built stars sublime.

  • We lift this lighthouse by the sea
  • The westmost sea, the westmost shore,
  • To guide man's ship of destiny
  • When Scylla and Charybdis roar;
  • To teach him strength, to proudly teach
  • God's grandeur, where His white palms reach:

  • To teach not Sybil books alone;
  • Man's books are but a climbing stair,
  • Lain step by step, like stairs of stone;
  • The stairway here, the temple there—
  • Man's lampad honor, and his trust,
  • The God who called him from the dust.

  • Man's books are but man's alphabet,
  • Beyond and on his lessons lie
  • The lessons of the violet,
  • The large gold letters of the sky;
  • The love of beauty, blossomed soil,
  • The large content, the tranquil toil:

  • The toil that nature ever taught,
  • The patient toil, the constant stir,
  • The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
  • The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
  • The toil of God incessantly
  • By palm-set land or frozen sea.

  • Behold this sea, that sapphire sky!
  • Where nature does so much for man,
  • Shall man not set his standard high,
  • And hold some higher, holier plan ?
  • Some loftier plan than ever planned
  • By outworn book of outworn laud ?

  • Where God has done so much for man!
  • Shall man for God do aught at all ?
  • The soul that feeds on books alone
  • I count that soul exceeding small
  • That lives alone by book and creed,
  • A soul that has not learned to read.

  • The light is on us, and such light!
  • Such perfumed warmth of winter sea!
  • Such musky smell of maiden night!
  • Such bridal bough and orange tree!
  • Such wondrous stars! You lily nioon
  • Seems like some long-lost afternoon!

  • More perfect than a string of pearls
  • We hold the full days of the year;
  • The days troop by like flower girls,
  • And all the days are ours here.
  • Here youth must learn; here age may live
  • Full tide each day the year can give.

  • No frosted wall, no frozen hasp,
  • Shuts Nature's book from us to-day;
  • Her palm leaves lift too high to clasp;
  • Her college walls the milky way.
  • The light is with us! Read and lead!
  • The larger book, the loftier deed!