Page:Oregon Literature by Horner.djvu/88

66

When a great genius is just rising to view, the astonished world says, "Who would have expected it?" So it was said of Homer Davenport who rose out of Silverton to glitter among the artists of the world. Busy men and women who had mingled with his modest ancestry for decades could scarcely realize that there had been generations of unassuming greatness—a veritable wealth of mind—that time and circumstances and God had wrought into a genius. They were glad—so glad they could hardly believe it—yet they were wont to think of him as a sort of intellectual accident emanating from nothingness and springing suddenly into the front ranks of modern artists. But, my friends, Genius comes not in this manner. "Who is this Nast?" was the burning question whispered throughout the world. "Whence came he?" rung down the electric lines of the continents. "How came he by this God-given genius?" was the question of the hour. And the answer came "He is a man from an Oregon hamlet—a child of genius—the evolution of a talented family and favorable environments." His mind is the natural offspring of an ancestry that has given the world great men and women in almost every department of human endeavor; and his mind was early nurtured upon the pictures he beheld in the scenes of Oregon, and he fed upon the nourishment of the ages. Then you cast your eye upward to be-