The brave workman who dares be himself and go hungry for the honor finds sooner or later a brilliant little fact rising in his consciousness—one that comes to stay, and which future thinking must be built around: that while the people are all that is low and bad in their change and rush of personality, they are also the soil of the future, a splendid potential mass that contains every heroism and masterpiece to be; that all great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them; that first the dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....
That which we see that hurts us so as workmen, is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.
To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realize that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall rise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.
“Rooming”
Helen Hoyt
I
O, I can tell when I get to my corner,
Where to turn in going to my house.
On the other corners along the avenue,
Northward and southward where the cars grind,