AN UNOFFICIAL BACCALAUREATE
hopes that are never realized. A little of this discounting of the future is wholesome. It would be a shame to send you out into the world expecting to be a prince in a fairy tale. But each year a few more well-meaning people make a few more of these same old sententious remarks in the same old superior way. By this time it is being absurdly overdone. You can't pick up a newspaper at this season of the year without finding a joke about the little graduate and the big world; every comic periodical has its perennial cartoon about the conceited ignorance of the fresh crops of college men and their unwieldy academic degrees. Comic artists make them because they are so easy to sell to editors.
Now, whether noticed by others or not, these things are taken pretty seriously by you who are about to die. For that matter so are all the complacent satirists in literature who smile quizzically at you while trying to convince you how ridiculous your hopes are. So are the classic poets who sigh sentimentally over the pathetic illusions of happy
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