Classic Poem

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;
We sow this seed as some good deed
Is sown, to grow until its worth
Shall grow, through rugged steeps of time,
To touch the utmost star 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 land?

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.