A Collection of College Words and Customs, page 49 by Benjamin Homer Hall
<< Return to Title Details & Download50
ring the first term of the year. After literary exercises within doors, a procession is formed, which proceeds at midnight through the principal streets of the city, with music and torches, conveying a coffin, supposed to contain the body of the old mathematician, to the funeral pile, when the whole is fired and consumed to ashes."--1853, p. 4.
From the lugubrious songs which are usually sung on these sad occasions, the following dirge is selected. It appears in the order of exercises for the "Burial of Euclid by the Class of '57," which took place at Yale College, November 8, 1854.
Tune,--"Auld Lang Syne."
I.
Come, gather all ye tearful Sophs, And stand around the ring; Old Euclid's dead, and to his shade A requiem we'll sing: Then join the saddening chorus, all Ye friends of Euclid true; Defunct, he can no longer bore, "[Greek: Pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]"[03]
II.
Though we to Pluto deadicate, No god to take him deigns, So, one short year from now will Fate Bring back his sad re-manes: For at Biennial his ghost Will prompt the tutor blue, And every fizzling Soph will cry, "[Greek: Pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]"
III.
Though here we now his corpus burn, And flames about him roar, The future Fresh shall say, that he's "Not dead, but gone before": We close around the dusky bier, And pall of sable hue, And silently we drop the tear; "[Greek: Pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]"
BURLESQUE BILL. At Princeton College, it is customary for the members of the Sophomore Class to hold annually a Sophomore Commencement, caricaturing that of the Senior Class. The Sophomore Commencement is in turn travestied by the Junior Class, who prepare and publish Burlesque Bills, as they are called, in which, in a long and formal programme, such subjects and speeches are attributed to the members of the Sophomore Class as are calculated to expose their weak points.
See SOPHOMORE COMMENCEMENT.
BURLINGTON. At Middlebury