Life's Enthusiasms By David Starr Jordan President of Leland Stanford Junior University Boston: American Unitarian Association MDCCCCVI To Melville Best Anderson That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changedwithout weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. Tochoose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chieffactor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire helptoward doing this, instinctively automatically as other habits areacquired. In the affairs of life, then, is no form of good manners, nohabit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English. Life's Enthusiasms It is the layman's privilege to take the text for his sermonswherever he finds it. I take mine from a French novel, a cynical storyof an unpleasant person, Samuel Brohl, by Victor Cherbuliez; And this isthe text and the whole sermon: "My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth orelse we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for welose a great many of them by the way. " And my message in its fashion shall be an appeal to enthusiasm in thingsof life, a call to do things because we love them, to love thingsbecause we do them, to keep the eyes open, the heart warm and the pulsesswift, as we move across the field of life. "To take the old world bythe hand and frolic with it;" this is Stevenson's recipe for joyousness. Old as the world is, let it be always new to us as we are new to it. Letit be every morning made afresh by Him who "instantly and constantlyreneweth the work of creation. " Let "the bit of green sod under yourfeet be the sweetest to you in this world, in any world. " Half the joyof life is in little things taken on the run. Let us run if we must--even the sands do that--but let us keep our hearts young and our eyesopen that nothing worth our while shall escape us. And everything isworth our while, if we only grasp it and its significance. As we growolder it becomes harder to do this. A grown man sees nothing he was notready to see in his youth. So long as enthusiasm lasts, so long is youthstill with us. To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources fromwhich enthusiasm may be derived. What does the school give us in thisdirection? Intellectual drill, broadening of mental horizon, professional training, all this we expect from school, college, anduniversity and in every phase of this there is room for a thousandenthusiasms. Moreover, the school gives us comradeship, the outlook onthe hopes and aspirations of our fellows. It opens to us the resourcesof young life, the luminous visions of the boys that are to be men. Wecome to know "the wonderful fellow to dream and plan, with the greatthing always to come, who knows?" His dream may be our inspiration as itpasses, as its realization may be the inspiration of future generations. In the school is life in the making, and with the rest we are making ourown lives with the richest materials ever at our hand. Life iscontagious, and in the fact lies the meaning of Comradeship. "Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern, " comradery among free spirits: thisis the definition of College Spirit given us by Hutten at Greifeswald, four centuries ago. This definition serves for us today. Life is thesame in every age. All days are one for all good things. They are allholy-days; to the freshman of today, all joys of comradery, all delightsof free enthusiasm are just as open, just as fresh as ever they were. From the teacher like influences should proceed. Plodding and proddingis not the teacher's work. It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashingof enthusiasms. A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen hiswork because he loves it, who makes no repine because he takes with itthe vow of poverty, who finds his reward in the joy of knowing and inthe joy of making known. It requires the master's touch to develop thegerms of the naturalist, the philosopher, the artist, or the poet. Ourteacher is the man who has succeeded along the line in which we hope tosucceed, whose success is measured as we hope to measure our own. Eachleader of science and of intellectual life is in some degree thedisciple of one who has planned and led before him. There is a heredityof intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as theheredity of the continuous germ-plasm. Ask the teacher who has helpedmould your life, who in turn was his own master. In a very fewgenerations you trace back your lineage to one of the great teachers theworld knows and loves. Who was your teacher in Natural History inAmerica? Was he a pupil of Agassiz, or was he a student of one ofAgassiz's pupils? Or, again, are there three generations back from youto the grand master of enthusiasms? And there are masters in the art of living as well as in other arts andsciences. "A log with Mark Hopkins at one end and myself at the other. "That was Garfield's conception of a university. It was said of EliphaletNott at Union College, that he "took the sweepings of other colleges andsent them back to society pure gold. " The older students of Stanfordwill always show the traces of the master teacher Thoburn. "In terms oflife, " thus he construed all problems of Science, of Philosophy, ofReligion. In terms of life, Thoburn's students will interpret all theirown various problems, for in terms of life all things we do must finallybe formulated. Every observation we make, every thought of our minds, every act of our hands has in some degree an ethical basis. It involvessomething of right or wrong, and without adhesion to right, all thought, all action must end in folly. And there is no road to righteousness sosure as that which has right living as a traveling companion. The very humanity of men at large is in itself a source of inspiration. Study men on the trains, at the ferry, on the road, in the jungles ofthe forest or in the jungles of great cities, --"through the ages, everyhuman heart is human. " Look for the best, and the best shall rise upalways to reward you. One who has traveled among simple-living people, men and women we call savages, because they live in the woods and not incleared land or cities, will bear witness that a savage may be a perfectgentleman. Now as I write their faces rise before me. Joyous, freelimbed, white toothed swimmers in Samoan surf, a Hawaiian eel-catcher, aMexican peon with his "sombrero trailing in the dust, " a deferentialJapanese farm boy anticipating your every want, a sturdy Chinamanwithout grace and without sensitiveness, but with the saving quality ofloyalty to his own word, herdsmen of the Pennine Alps, Aleuts, Indiansand Negroes, each race has its noblemen and through these humanity isennobled. It is worth while to go far from Boston to find that suchthings are true. And we may look not alone among primitive folk who have never envied usour civilization or ever cared that we possessed it. Badalia Herodsfoot, in Kipling's story, lived and died in darkest London. Gentle hearts andpure souls exist among our own unfortunates, those to whom our societyhas shown only its destroying side. All misery and failure as well asall virtue has its degrees, and our social scheme is still far from thedemands of perfect justice. Some one has said that "the wise young man will wear out three dresssuits in a year. " This is a playful way of saying that he will not shunmen and women, even those bound by the conventions of society. All suchassociation can be made to pay--not in money--but in getting the pointof view of other people. This is worth while if not costing too much oftime and strength. There is another maxim which can offset the first. Itis from Lorimer's Chicago pork packer: "You will meet fools enoughduring the day without trying to roundup the main herd of them atnight. " But even the main herd of fools may teach its lesson to thestudent of human nature. It gives at least a point of departure in thestudy of wisdom. To study men or to kill time. What is your motive? Thepoorest use of time is to kill it. This is the weakest and most cowardlyform of suicide. Moreover it is never quite successful. That "time whichcrawleth like a monstrous snake, wounded and slow and very venomous" issure to take its own revenges. It is therefore good to look on the cheerful side of life. A touch ofhumor is necessary to the salvation of the serious man. It is a gift ofthe men of America to see droll things and to express them in drollfashion. To see the funny side of one's own accomplishments is thehighest achievement of the American philosopher and there is hope forthe land in which the greatest wits have been the most earnest of moralteachers. Who was more earnest than Oliver Wendell Holmes, who moregenuine than Mark Twain? Without the saving grace of humor our Puritanconscience which we all possess would lead us again into allextravagance, witch-burnings, Quaker-stoning, heresy trials, andintolerance of politics and religion. From all these we are saved by ourfeeling for the incongruous. A touch of humor recalls us to our senses. It "makes the whole world kin. " In the love of nature is another source of saving grace. Science ispower. In the stores of human experience lies the key to action, andmodern civilization is built on Science. The love of nature is akin toScience but different. Contact with outdoor things is direct experience. It is not stored, not co-ordinated, not always convertible into power, but real, nevertheless, and our own. The song of birds, the swarming ofbees, the meadow carpeted with flowers, the first pink harbingers of theearly spring, the rush of the waterfall, the piling up of the rocks, thetrail through the forest, the sweep of the surf, the darting of thefishes, the drifting of the snow, the white crystals of the frost, theshrieking of the ice, the boom of the bittern, the barking of the sealions, the honk of the wild geese, the skulking coyote who knows thateach beast is his enemy and has not even a flea to help him "forget thathe is a dog, " the leap of the salmon, the ecstasy of the mocking-birdand bobolink, the nesting of the field-mice, the chatter of thesquirrel, the gray lichen of the oak, the green moss on the log, thepoppies of the field and the Mariposa lilies of the cliff--all theseand ten thousand more pictures which could be called up equally atrandom and from every foot of land on the globe--all these are objectsof nature. All these represent a point of human contact and the reactionwhich makes for youth, for virtue and for enthusiasm. To travel is merely to increase the variety of contact by giving ourtime to it, and by extending the number of points at which contact ispossible. It may be that "he who wanders widest, lifts no more ofbeauty's jealous veils than he who from his doorway sees the miracle offlowers and trees. " It is true, however, that the experiences of thetraveler cover a wider range and fill his mind with a larger and morevaried store of remembered delights. The very names of beloved regionscall up each one its own picture. The South Seas; to have wandered amongtheir green isles is to have seen a new world, a new heaven and a newearth. The white reef with its whiter rim of plunging surf, the swayingpalms, the flashing waterfall, the joyous people, straight as Greeks andcolored like varnished leather, the bread-fruit tree and the brownorange, the purple splendor of the vine called Bougainvillia, and aboveall the volcanic mountains, green fringed with huge trees, with treeferns and palms, the whole tied together into an impenetrable jungle bythe long armed lianas. The Sierra Nevada, sweeping in majestic waves ofstone, alive with color and steeped in sunshine. Switzerland, Norway, Alaska, Tyrol, Japan, Venice, the Windward Islands and the Gray Azores, Chapultepec with its dream of white-cloaked volcanoes, Enoshima andGotemba with their peerless Fujiyama, Nikko with its temples, LochLomond, Lake Tahoe, Windermere, Tintagel by the Cornish Sea, theYellowstone and the Canyon of the Colorado, the Crater Lake of Oregon, Sorrento with its Vesuvius, Honolulu with its Pali, the Yosemite, Banffwith its Selkirks, Prince Frederick's Sound with its green fjords, theChamounix with its Mont Blanc, Bern with its Oberland, Zermatt with itsMatterhorn, Simla with "the, great silent wonder of the snows. " "Even now as I write, " says Whymper the master mountain climber, "theyrise before me an endless series of pictures magnificent in effect, inform and color. I see great peaks with clouded tops, seeming to mountupward for ever and ever. I hear the music of distant herds, thepeasant's yodel and the solemn church bells. And after these have passedaway, another train of thought succeeds, of those who have been braveand true, of kind hearts and bold deeds, of courtesies received fromstrangers' hands, trifles in themselves but expressive of that good-willwhich is the essence of charity. " That poetry was a means of grace was known to the first man who wrote averse or who sang a ballad. It was discovered back in the darknessbefore men invented words or devised letters. The only poetry you willever know is that you learned by heart when you were young. Happy is hewho has learned much, and much of that which is good. Bad poetry is notpoetry at all except to the man who makes it. For its creator, even thefeeblest verse speaks something of inspiration and of aspiration. It issaid that Frederick the Great went into battle with a vial of poison inone pocket and a quire of bad verse in the other. Whatever we think ofthe one, we feel more kindly toward him for the other. Charles Eliot Norton advises every man to read a bit of poetry every dayfor spiritual refreshment. It would be well for each of us if we shouldfollow this advice. It is not too late yet and if some few would heedhis words and mine, these pages would not be written in vain. I heard once of a man banished from New England to the Llano Estacado, the great summer-bitten plains of Texas. While riding alone among hiscows over miles of yucca and sage he kept in touch with the worldthrough the poetry he recited to himself. His favorite, I remember, wasWhittier's "Randolph of Roanoke:" "Here where with living ear and eyeHe heard Potomac flowing, And through his tall ancestral treesSaw Autumn's sunset glowing; "Too honest or too proud to feignA love he never cherished, Beyond Virginia's border lineHis patriotism perished. "But none beheld with clearer eyeThe plague spot o'er her spreading, Nor heard more sure the steps of doomAlong her future treading. " This is good verse and it may well serve to relate the gray world ofNorthern Texas to the many-colored world in which men struggle and diefor things worthwhile, winning their lives eternally through losingthem. Here are some other bits of verse which on the sea and on the lands, inthe deserts or in the jungles have served the same purpose for othermen, perhaps indeed for you. "It has been prophesied these many yearsI should not die save in Jerusalem, Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land. But bear me to that chamber, there I'll lie, In this Jerusalem shall Hardy die. " -- "And gentlemen of England now abedShall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhood cheap while any speaksWho fought with us upon St. Crispin's day. " -- "Let me come in where you sit weeping, aye:Let me who have not any child to dieWeep with you for the little one whose loveI have known nothing of. The little arms that slowly, slowly loosedTheir pressure round your neck, the hands you usedTo kiss. Such arms, such hands I never knew. May I not weep with youFain would I be of service, say somethingBetween the tears, that would be comforting. But ah! So sadder than yourselves am IWho have no child to die. " -- "Your picture smiles as once it smiled;The ring you gave is still the same;Your letter tells, O changing child, No tidings since it came!Give me some amuletThat marks intelligence with you, Red when you love and rosier red, And when you love not, pale and blue. Alas that neither bonds nor vowsCan certify possession. Torments me still the fear that LoveDied in his last expression. " -- "He walks with God upon the hillsAnd sees each morn the world ariseNew bathed in light of Paradise. He hears the laughter of her rills;She to his spirit undefiledMakes answer as a little child;Unveiled before his eyes she standsAnd gives her secrets to his hands. " -- "Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, The river sang below, The dim Sierras far beyond upliftingTheir minarets of snow. The roaring campfire with good humor paintedThe ruddy tints of healthOn haggard face and form that drooped and faintedIn the fierce race for wealth. Till one arose and from his pack's scant treasureThe hoarded volume drew, And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisureTo hear the tale anew. And as around them shadows gathered fasterAnd as the firelight fell, He read aloud the book wherein the MasterHad writ of Little Nell. Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy, for the readerWas youngest of them all, Yet, as he read, from clustering pine and cedarA silence seemed to fall. The fir trees gathering closer in the shadowsListened in every spray, While the whole camp with little Nell, on English meadows, Wandered and lost their way. Lost is that camp and wasted all its fire, And he who wro't that spell;Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye have one tale to tell. Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant storyBlend with the breath that thrillsWith hop vines' incense all the pensive gloryThat fills the Kentish hills. And on that grave where English oak and hollyAnd laurel wreath entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine. " -- "Dark browed she broods with weary lidsBeside her Sphynx and Pyramids, With her low, never lifted eyes. If she be dead, respect the dead;If she be weeping, let her weep;If she be sleeping, let her sleep;For lo, this woman named the stars. She suckled at her tawny dugsYour Moses, while ye reeked with warsAnd prowled the woods, rude, painted thugs. " -- "The tumult and the shouting dies;The captains and the kings depart;Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, The humble and the contrite heart. " -- "Careless seems the Great Avenger, History's pages but recordOne death grapple in the darkness Twixt old systems and the word. Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;But that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim UnknownStandeth God within the shadow. Keeping watch above his own. " -- "Pledge me round, I bid you declare, All good fellows whose beards are gray, Did not the fairest of the fairCommon grow and wearisome, ereEver a month had passed away?The reddest lips that ever have kissed, The brightest eyes that ever have shoneMay pray and whisper and we not listOr look away and never be missedEre yet ever a month is gone. Gillian's dead. God rest her bier!How I loved her twenty years syne!Marian's married and I sit hereAlone and merry at forty year, Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. " -- "Under the wide and starry skyDig my grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly dieAnd I lay me down with a will. This be the verse ye grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill. '" -- "By the brand upon my shoulders, By the lash of clinging steel, By the welts the whips have left me, By the wounds that never heal, By the eyes grown dim with staringAt the sun-wash on the brine, I am paid in full for service, --Would that service still were mine. " And with these the more familiar verses beginning: "Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea. " "Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music. " "Just for a handful of silver he left us. " "Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead. " "O to be in England, now that April's there. " "The mists are on the Oberland, The Fungfrau's snows look faint and far. " "The word of the Lord by nightTo the watching pilgrims came. " "Fear, a forgotten form;Death, a dream of the eyes;We were atoms in God's great stormThat raged through the angry skies!" And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammeredout on the anvil of the terrible Civil War. Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal toyour taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range ofliterature is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand--best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have lovedthe highest. " It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you canreach. Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will giveyou a fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. Thatis poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, inwords which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed withoutweakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To choose theright word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in goodwriting. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doingthis instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In theaffairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage morevaluable than the habit of good English. And to this end the masters ofEnglish, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we mayadd Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It isnot in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truthcan be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne inmemory. Take this from Emerson: "The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow fallsor water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, whereverare forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets intocelestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love--there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the worldover thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. " "I took a walk the other day, " so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding'sfarm. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a statelypine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as intosome noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogetheradmirable family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown tome--to whom the sun was servant. I saw their path, their pleasuringground through the woods in Spaulding's cranberry meadow. The pinesfurnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious tovision, the trees grew through it. They have sons and daughters. Theyare quite well. The farmer's cart path which leads directly throughtheir hall does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom ofthe pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heardof Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstandingI heard him whistle as he drove his team through their house. Nothingcan equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply alichen. It is painted on the pines and the oaks. They are of nopolitics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they wereweaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearingwas done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distanthive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They hadno idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for theirindustry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find itdifficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. Itis only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became againaware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this Ithink I should move out of Concord. " In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not onlyprofessional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higherliving and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, theacquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have feltand thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It isthe movement of man. It is the movement of individual men, and it is ingiving illumination to personal and racial characters that thesuccession of incidents has its value. The picturesque individual, theman who could not be counted with the mass, the David, the Christ, theBrutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the Charlemagne, theCromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the Helmholtz, theGoethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all these giveinspiration to history. It is well that we should know them, should knowthem all, should know them well--an education is incomplete that is notbuilt about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship of great men. With all this comes that feeling of dedication to the highest purposeswhich is the essential feature of religion. Religion should be known byits tolerance, its broadmindedness, its faith in God and humanity, itsrecognition of the duty of action. And action should be understood in a large way, the taking of one's partin affairs worth doing, not mere activity, nor fussiness, nor movementfor movement's sake, like that of "ants on whom pepper is sprinkled. " Asthe lesser enthusiasms fade and fail, one should take a stronger hold onthe higher ones. "Grizzling hair the brain doth clear" and one sees inbetter perspective the things that need doing. It is thus possible togrow old as a "grand old man, " a phrase invented for Gladstone, butwhich fits just as well our own Mark Twain. Grand old men are those whohave been grand young men, and carry still a young heart beneath oldshoulders. There are plenty of such in our country to-day, though theaverage man begins to give up the struggle for the higher life at forty. President White, President Eliot, President Angell, --few men have leftso deep an impression on the Twentieth Century. Edward Everett Hale, theteacher who has shown us what it is to have a country. Senator Hoar, Professor Agassiz, Professor Le Conte, Professor Shaler, --all these, whatever the weight of years, remained young men to the last. WhenAgassiz died, the Harvard students "laid a wreath of laurel on his bierand their manly voices sang a requiem, for he had been a student all hislife long, and when he died he was younger than any of them. " Jeffersonwas in the seventies when he turned back to his early ambition, thefoundation of the University of Virginia. The mother of StanfordUniversity was older than Jefferson before she laid down the great workof her life as completed. When the heart is full, it shows itself inaction as well as in speech. When the heart is empty, then life is nolonger worth while. The days pass and there is no pleasure in them. Letus then fill our souls with noble ideals of knowledge, of art, ofaction. "Let us lay up a stock of enthusiasms in our youth, lest wereach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose many ofthem by the way. " We hear much in these days of the wickedness of power, of the evilbehavior of men in high places, of men in low places, and men whom thepeople have been perforce obliged to trust. This is no new thing, thoughthe struggle against it, the combination of the forces of reform andblackmail, of dreamers and highwaymen, is offering some new phases. There is a kind of music popular with uncritical audiences and withpeople who know no better, which answers to the name of "ragtime. " It isthe music of those who do not know good music or who have not the moralforce to demand it. The spirit of ragtime is not confined to music:graft is the ragtime of business, the spoils system the ragtime ofpolitics, adulteration the ragtime of manufacture. There is ragtimescience, ragtime literature, ragtime religion. You will know each ofthese by its quick returns. The spirit of ragtime determines the sixbest sellers, the most popular policeman, the favorite congressman, thewealthiest corporation, the church which soonest rents its pews. But it does not, control the man who thinks for himself. It has no lienon the movements of history, its decrees avail nothing in the fixing oftruth. The movements of the stars pay it no tribute, neither do themovements of humanity. The power of graft is a transient deception. Emerson's parable of the illusions gives the clue to our time, to alltime, in its contrast of the things which appear with the things thatabide. "There is no chance and no anarchy in the Universe, " says Emerson, "allis system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. Theyoung mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone withthem alone, they pronouncing on him benedictions and gifts, andbeckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant and incessantly fallsnow storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which swaysthis way and that and whose movements and doings he must obey. Hefancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd driveshither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, nowthat. What is he that he should resist their will and think and act forhimself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions tobaffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant the airclears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sittingaround him on their thrones--they alone with him alone. " -- The last paragraphs of this little essay were written within a hugehotel of steel and stone in the heart of a bustling city, in the mostgracious of lands and under the bluest of skies. A great commercial cityit was, a wondrous city, full of all manner of men--eager, impulsive, loving, enthusiastic men; men cunning and grasping, given over to all"high, hard lust and wilful deed;" carefree, joyous men living in thepresent and taking their chances for the future; men who have whistledall the airs that fluttering birds and frolicking children have learnedto sing; workmen of all grades, quiet, courageous and self-respecting, and weak, disgruntled and incapable; bright-eyed, clear-headed, sagacious men, such men as build a state; hopeless, broken, disappointedmen, who have made this city of hope their last resort; gamblers, parasites, bartenders, agitators, self-seekers, haters of men and hatersof organization, impossibles, men uncontrolled and uncontrollable, ofevery nation and with every dialect of the civilized world--and ofuncivilized worlds also;--the most cosmopolitan of all American towns, the one fullest of the joy of living, the one least fearful of futuredisaster, "serene, indifferent to fate, " thus her own poets have styledher, and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious, mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc. In a day thiscity has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an hourin the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels, libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gamblingdens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye;millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small, foolishand courageous, with their women and children of like natures with them, fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to the hillsand the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting sands they allslept together or were awake together in the old primal equality oflife. Never since man began to plan and to create has there been such adestruction of the results of human effort. Never has a great calamitybeen met with so little repining. Never before has the common man shownhimself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and his future. For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of manthat shapes the fates. It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken andcannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but hestands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing tobuild a great city. Men can do this in a quarter century, workingtogether each at his own part. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and now, ever and forever the man mustrise above his own creations. That which is in the man is greater thanall that he can do. "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloudUnder the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody but not bowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the yearsFinds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul!"