Page:University Education for Women.djvu/22

 This aspect will not of course be the same for all students, and to a great extent it will be for each one very much what she makes it for herself. The proverbial difficulty of making the individual drink, after being led to the well springs of knowledge and intellectual culture, is a difficulty that the best organisations cannot overcome. But, making every allowance for the defects of human beings and human institutions. I think that the students who have the intellectual tastes and trained faculties which fit them for academic study may, if they are not below the average in seriousness of aim and steadiness of purpose, expect to find in University life a period happy while it lasts and a cause of happiness afterwards, both through its memories and its results. This happiness springs from various sources. One of these, and for many not the least valued, is the opportunity it affords for intimate friendship and social converse, the play of sympathy in work and relaxation; but on this I will not dwell, because, though University life is certainly rich in such opportunities, they may, happily, be also found elsewhere.

I will rather dwell on two gifts—one moral and one intellectual— which it is, I think, a special privilege of the University to bestow on those who will imbibe its spirit and surrender themselves to its influence. The moral quality is easy to feel, but somewhat difficult to express. May I call it the sense of membership of a worthy community, with a high and noble function in which every member can take part, and at the same time not so vast an extent as to reduce the individual to insignificance: a community whose larger life seems to grow into and expand the narrower life of the individual members, gently constraining them to wider interests and more strenuous activities, and by self-fortgetfulness which it makes easy and natural, relieving the stress of personal anxieties without imposing any sacrifice of legitimate self-regard.

The intellectual gift I may describe as the habit of reasonable self-dependence in thought and study, to