No one knows what that shall be, but the words are vision-filled: prophetic of an ordered beauty of architecture, a harmony of taste, that the old Wellesley, on the far side of the fire, strove after but never knew; prophetic of a pinnacled and aspiring scholarship whose solid foundations were laid forty years deep in Christian trust and patience; prophetic of a questing spirit freed from the old reproach of provincialism; of a ministering spirit in which the virtue of true courtesy is fulfilled.
The end of her first half century will see the campus flowering with the outward and visible signs of the new Wellesley; and even as the old fire-hallowed bricks have made beautiful the new walls, so the beauty of the old dreams shall shine in the new vision.
"Pageant of fretted roofs that cl.u.s.ter*
On hill and knoll in the branches green, Ye are but shadows, and not the l.u.s.ter, Garment, ye, of a grace unseen.
"All our life is confused with fable, Ever the fact as the phantasy seems: Yet the world of spirit lies sure and stable, Under the shows of the world of dreams.
"Not an idle and false derision The rocks that crumble, the stars that fail; Meaning caskets within the vision, Shaping the folds of the woven veil."
* Katharine Lee Bates: from a poem, "The College Beautiful," 1886.