Hear the Echoes Ring (Or Green Corn)
Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu; My mother and my nurse, that bears me yet! Where'er I wander, boast of this I can, Though banish'd, yet a trueborn Englishman. KING RICHARD IIAct 1, Scene 3
"A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child?" Thus wrote Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass. And now, although I left there during freshman year, and that was more than half a century ago, my grandson, bringing me a book about The College on the Hill, asks me: "What was Dartmouth like when you were there?" How should I answer? Let me try.
"Dartmouth was the railroad stop at Lewiston, the little station now long gone; the Ledyard Bridge with weathered sides and gabled roof that spanned the river where the motor cars now cross on streamlined steel; the hill up which the horses used to draw the ancient stagecoach with its cargo of young men.
"Dartmouth was the group of boarding houses like the one we called the 'Bagley Club' where days began with orange juice, thick cream, Wheatena, sausage cakes, and eggs and ended up with sugar doughnuts, steak and apple pie, and where the heroes of the diamond, rink or football field waited on the tables.
"Dartmouth was the hissing steam heat in the red brick dorms surrounding Dartmouth Hall as mellow bell-tones sent a summons to the morning's service in the chapel.
"Dartmouth was the gathering at dusk of wholesome happy youngsters on the green to send their cheers up with the leaping flames of monumental football fires toward a silent star-flecked sky.
"Dartmouth was the clear cold winter climate and the snow; the sound of distant sleigh bells in the night; the carefree crowd that left the silent movies at The Nugget, buttoning up their sheepskin coats; lights shining from the windows where the students boned up for a test; a snatch of song from some convivial fraternity where wassailers were gathered with their 'brothers' 'round a cheerful open fire.
"Dartmouth was a little unspoiled town, one street of shops whose merchants knew their customers as well as every student knew the members of his class, and none displayed the sign 'No Dogs Allowed.'
"Dartmouth was a range of gold and crimson crested hills that looked down in the autumn on the football field; snow shoveled off a pond where red-cheeked children came to slide and skate, and - out beyond - the tracks of scores of skiers where, come spring, the golfers would foregather in their sweaters and plus fours!
"Dartmouth was the little school that Eleazar Wheelock founded for the Indians; the place that Daniel Webster loved and Robert Frost could not forget."
I can't forget it either, though my time in Hanover was short, so short I forfeited the joy of over three full years of learning, comradeship, and something priceless that's beyond my power to express. I love my grandson much too much to let him lose the things I lost by dropping out. "Don't you do that, my boy!" I said.
This short piece, including the title and sub-head, was written anonymously. We think we know the author, however, to be a man who spent his freshman year at Dartmouth, went on to a sister Ivy League institution where he was class president, and who has had a most distinguished career.
