The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

The attendant says: “Do not go too near. Those quills are poison.”

“Yes, indeed,” answers Avanel as the light dawns instantly. “And Java is almost the same as Singapore. We might have known such beasts came from near Singapore. I have heard of them. They are the Singaporian lions.”

Then we forget these beasts and walk eastward along the Sangamon River Drive. Through the openings of the trees and from the higher points we look back southward. We have had our feast and our Amaranth-Apples in the Sangamon Park pavilion. The star chimes are ringing. The towers are there to the south. What torch bearers before time have equalled these priest-wizards with entrails of fire? They are sterner than priests. They are the soldier-machines of liberty that will sweep the world. They are the Macedonian phalanx that will decide for another century every field upon which they will appear. The merchants of Singapore refuse to use the Sunset Towers, when they build their new cities in their battle for world supremacy, and even by that they are doomed. The houses and commercial palaces and temples of Singapore crouch little and low, like huts in a forest, or glass pagodas in little stage comedies. They are fearful of the incantations hatched in our hives of electrical flame that shine on to the glory of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who planned the first ones, a century ago, and the Thibetan Boy and John Emis, who build them today.

Avanel and I walk south to the city down beautiful Fifteenth Street. The city is the Fair and the Fair is the city, though there has not yet come the formal proclamation to the world of the opening. There is not one heart on the street but seems to be beating happily. The elation in the air on this perfect June night is worth a lifetime of groans. It seems to me that for this hour Springfield has been patiently toiling and staggering on, despite much sorrow and sin, for a century. All the children of this generation seem to sweep by us and to be spending the stored up capacity of themselves and all their ancestors for jubilation.

There are hundreds of unspoiled sightseers in the crowd looking on the lights of Springfield, often for the first time. These visitors will not wait for the Mayor’s proclamation, that the Fair has begun.

And they are happy, but not as we two are. The bass viol orchestra of the lacquered and rumbling pleasure wagons sings a special song to us though we be independent walkers. We hear them, we boast, better than they hear themselves. There is a babble and a roar that is the beating of the vast heart of Springfield. Its rhythm goes into our footfalls every instant.

It is late, and Avanel insists on going on, in the intoxication of weariness, and will not let me take her to her house on Mulberry Boulevard. She leads me into the very thick of the great forest of Sunset Towers again, now “midnight towers,” she says to me, with her face flushed to a deep crimson from utter weariness, and her eyes heavy with the desire for sleep, and her determined little feet still dancing nervously on. And this is what her soul says to me, and what we say to one another, in our fashion, as we whirl on: “Not until another civilization rises here, will there be a rival form to these towers. It is only a matter of years till the type be perfected by John Emis or the Thibetan Boy or their kind. The first generation of ripened builders came a century ago. That was our Early Renaissance. At last our High Renaissance has come. The ripe architectural genius will appear who will gather to himself all that can be known of beam and girder and truss, of foundation and wind pressure and the distribution of light, all that can be learned about hollow brick and tile, of pillar and elevator and fireproofing. He will understand the chances peculiar to his materials and town. His imagination will be a smelter, a mastered volcano. He will have visions of welded steel that will put all men to shame but the builders of the Parthenon, the hewers of the Sphinx. There shall be no borrowings from Paris or Rome.

“The least minor decoration shall reflect the majesty of the dream, as the Gothic altar carving repeated the flying buttress and the spires leaping heavenward.

“Because we take our pleasure at the feet of the Sunset Towers, now ‘midnight towers’ while the midnight stars go by, they shall be reembodied and perfected in the sons that shall spring from them like light.

“They are the rose and gold progenitors of Springfield, the rainbow patriarchs of Springfield. They stand proudly through the night and the lighted streets below them are like a carpet of goldenrod and dandelions unrolled at their feet. Their heads are so far in the heavens they converse with their serene sister the moon. They look out together to the Springfield University and the Sangamon River where the bridges sweep to the north, sparkling threads in the mist. They look south to the Street of Past History that bends around till it meets them.