Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/376

Rh resting place at Portland—Riverview Cemetery."—From Memorial Address by T. L. Elliot, D. D.

"It was given to the generation of Mr. Scott's youth and to the succeeding generation of his maturer years to take a wilderness in the rough and mold it through steadily advancing forms to the uses of modern life. At the beginning of Mr. Scott's career, Oregon was a country whose very name was best known to the world as a poet's synonym for solitude and mystery; at the end it was a country which might challenge the world as an example of the worthiest things in social development. Thus background of Mr. Scott's career was a shifting quantity, presenting each year—almost each month—new conditions and fresh problems, and calling to the man who for forty-five years was the preeminent leader of its thoughts for new adjustments, oftentimes for compromises. If it must be said of Mr. Scott that the essential values of his character were individual, it still remains to be said that they were profoundly related to the conditions and times in which his work was done. The great figures of any era are those who, sustaining the relationships of practical understanding and sympathy, are still in vision and purpose in advance of the popular mind and of the common activities. So it was with Mr. Scott. There was never a day of the many years of his long sustained ascendancy in the life of Oregon in which he did not stand somewhat apart and somewhat in advance of his immediate world. In this there was an element oi power; but there was in it, too, an element of pathos. For closely and sympathetically identified as Mr. Scott was at all times with the life of Oregon he was, nevertheless, one doomed by the tendencies of his character and duties to a life measurably solitary.

The fewest number of men are pre-eminently successful in more than a single ensemble of conditions. Any radical change is likely first to disconcert and ultimately destroy adjustments of individual power to working situations.