Those were the nights when the
Countess Cathleen--loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies--found Paradise
and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when
she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.
But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the
moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then
the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs,
Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and
dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn.
To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down
among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting
Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so
vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past
Tree Days.
On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a
pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall
once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger
sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the
wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession
winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors
and sophomores and freshmen,--more than fourteen hundred of them
in 1914.
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