Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/373

 made illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy free cities of Flanders and Germany—and it discovered America, not the America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind.

And, surely, this America is not always to bear the reproach of having no music, and so little painting and literature of her own. Surely the aspirations of this new land, with the irresistible impulse of the democratic spirit and humanistic culture are to find emotional expression in the terms and forms of enduring beauty. It was this sublime adventure that interested me far more than the trivial and repulsive wrangles of the politicians

Our opponents had never known how wholly right they were in their reiterated charge that I was but a dreamer; incorrigible dreamer indeed, and nothing more!

But in these years I had given my city the best there was in me, little as that was, and when the legislature made provision for the constitutional convention, which met at Columbus, and, after months of deliberation, submitted a long list of amendments