America, the Beautiful
One hundred thousand persons, it has been estimated, each day sing the patriotic poem of Miss Katherine Lee Bates, who was a teacher of English literature in Wellesley College. Some schools make it a practice to have the children sing it daily. At the commencement of Syracuse University in 1930, a strange thrill swept the company of over one thousand young men and women who were assembled to receive their degrees, and the four thousand persons who were present to witness the graduation exercises, as they sang this hymn. Mighty was the volume of song as the words were reached:
“America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”
The source of the inspiration of this poem was related by Beatrice York Houghton. In an interview Miss Bates said that she and some friends had gone up Pike’s Peak and the vision from that great height exalted her soul into poetic fervor. The wide reaches of country—her country—the dizzy height which set her above it all, gave her a god-like inspiration, and the lines which came into her mind were remembered, afterwards to be set down.
The origin of a nation’s life was strikingly evidenced in