“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”—Christ.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”—St. Paul.
“Oh, poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the grace of the highest poverty.”—St. Francis.
“I with my barbaric yawp, yawping over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman.
Are things to be made right by law? I will admit that some wide and sweeping differences can be eliminated. Tyrants can occasionally be pulled down and humanitarians elevated for the time being. Yes, yes. A rough equation can be struck always, and it is something of that of which these men were dreaming. But even so, in the face of all the physical, temperamental, spiritual, intellectual, to say nothing of climatic and planetary differences, what matter? Will law save an idiot or undo a Shelley or a Caesar? Will law pull down the sun and set the moon in its place? My masters, we can only sympathize at times where we cannot possibly act,—and we can act and aid where we cannot cure. But of a universal panacea there is only a dream—or so I feel. Yet it is because we can and do dream—and must, at times—and because of our dreams and the fact that they must so often be shattered, that we have art and the joy of this thing called Life. Without contrast there is no life. And without dreams there might not be any alteration in these too sharp contrasts. But where would our dreams be, I ask you—or the need of them—if all of that of which we are compelled to dream and seek in an agony of sweat and despair were present and we did not need to dream? Then what?
But let us away with abstrusities. Let us sing over Life as it is. These tall, poetic souls—are they not beautiful? And would you not have it so that they may appear?
In riding up this same street I was on familiar ground, for here, twentytwo years before, in that same raw spring which took me to Buffalo, I stopped, looking for work—and found some, of sorts. I connected myself for a very little while (a week or two) with the Sunday issue of the Plain Dealer and did a few specials, trying to prove to the incumbent of the high office of Sunday editor that I was a remarkable man. He did not see it—or me. He commented once that my work was too lofty in tone, that I loved to rhapsodize too much. I know he was right. Nevertheless, the second city afterwards (Pittsburg), like the others from which I had just come (Toledo, St. Louis, and Chicago), liked me passing well. But my ambition did not run to a permanent position in Cleveland anyhow.
Just the same, and what was of interest to me this morning as I rode into Cleveland, was that here, after a most wonderful ramble east from St. Louis, I had arrived, quite as in Buffalo, spiritually very hungry and lorn. As I look back on it now I know that I must have been a very peculiar youth, for nothing I could find or do contented me for so much as an hour. I had achieved a considerable newspaper success in St. Louis, but had dropped it as being meaningless; and because of a silly dream about running a country newspaper (which I shall narrate later) in a town called Grand Rapids, Ohio, I had a chance to take over said country paper, but when I looked it over and pictured to myself what the local life would be, I fled in horror. In Toledo I encountered a poet and an enthusiast, a youth destined to prove one of the most helpful influences in my whole career, with whom I enjoyed a period of intense mental cerebration, yet him I left also, partly because I lacked money and an interesting future there, but more because I felt restless and wanted to see more of the world.
One of my principal trials at this time was that I was in love and had left the object of my adoration behind me, and was not sure that I would ever earn enough money to go and fetch her,—so uncertain were my talents and my opportunities in my own eyes.
And like Buffalo, which came after Cleveland in my experience, this city seemed dirty and raw and black, but forceful. America was in the furnace stage of its existence. Everything was in the making,—fortunes, art, its social and commercial life, everything. The most astonishing thing in it was its rich men, their houses, factories, institutions of commerce and pleasure. Nothing else had occurred. There was nothing to see but business and a few hotels,—one, really—and theatres. I remember looking at a great soldiers' monument (it is still here in the principal square) and wondering why so large a monument. I do not recall that any man of Cleveland particularly distinguished himself in the Civil War.