Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/389

Rh The professor of rhetoric at the University of Oregon used his editorials in the classroom as examples of pure English prose; candidates for governor came humbly to his office, anxiously watching his countenance for a favorable sign; leaders in social reform grew timid and postponed their plans when he frowned, as he often did; men died and he gave them a column or a paragraph and that was the world's appraisal of their deeds and their lives. He thundered through the columns of the Oregonian and the reverberations sounded from the Siskiyous to Puget Sound, from Astoria to Boise. He held in his strong grasp for 45 years the most powerful thing in Oregon—the public opinion of that broad commonwealth and of a wide fringe around it.

Does not such a man go on living beyond the grave? Does not such a personality continue in perpetuity? It has been 25 years since the impressive funeral ceremonies of the Scottish Rite Masons in an auditorium filled with people, and that quarter of a century does not give an entirely affirmative answer.

His life possessed a tremendous momentum, to carry it far beyond the tomb, and he left, more than most men, continuing aids for the extension of his fame into the future: Wealth, a newspaper which he made great, prestige in the recollections of a multitude. Selections from his writings were published in books and a bronze statue of heroic size was placed in Mt. Tabor Park in Portland. Perhaps a million people still know who he was.

It is a fame, however, which is too formal and aloof and already too much requiring adventitious promo-