[On the meaning of the bar of music]
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Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were't not a Shame -- were't not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
OMAR KHAYYAM (FITZGERALD).
[On the meaning of the bar of music]
From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, manythoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, haveflowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the largerworld here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants inculture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them.Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men,black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contactof living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world,crying, "If the contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on suchLife." To be sure, behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force anddominion, -- the making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads andred calico cloys.
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The second thought streaming from the death-ship and thecurving river is the thought of the older South, -- the sincere and passionatebelief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertiumquid, and called it a Negro, -- a clownish, simple creature, at times evenlovable within its limita- tions, but straitly foreordained to walk within theVeil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, -- some of themwith favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare notlet them, and we build about them walls so high, and hang between them and thelight a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darkerthought, -- the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-consciousmutter of men who are black and whitened, crying "Liberty, Freedom,Opportunity -- vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of livingmen!" To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, -- suppose,after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this madimpulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, eventhrough conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced byfraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yetsure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought andafterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men forlife.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sageand dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at oncegrotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desertand wild we have within our threshold, -- a stalwart laboring force, suited tothe semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use anddevelop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized bythe brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons,selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, whatshall save us from national deca- dence? Only that saner selfishness, whichEducation teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet
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it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must bereckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfullystormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must notbe encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, butunpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion andcommon decency. They can be met in but one way, -- by the breadth andbroadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too,the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward,and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak anduntrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly isto welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps.The guiding of thought and the deft coordina- tion of deed is at once the pathof honor and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vastand partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Educationleaps to the lips of all: -- such human training as will best use the labor ofall men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poiseto encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those thatin sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, andthe mounting fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will setthis tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for lifeteaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of blackmen and white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier.Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful solely for theembellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we haveclimbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledgeto all, display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mysteryof Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market,but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and character. Thisprogramme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part ofthe land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealingwith two backward peoples. To make here in human
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education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent-- of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium -- has been there, asit ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment andfrequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varyingdecades of work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close ofthe war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief.There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's Bureauin chaotic disarrangement seeking system and cooperation. Then followed tenyears of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete schoolsystems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for thefreedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was theinevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master andthe ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage ofthe storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land sawglimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educationalsystem striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work everbroader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequatelyequipped, illogically distributed, and of varying efficiency and grade; thenormal and high schools were doing little more than common-school work, and thecommon schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be inthem, and training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, byreason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the morebecame set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crys- tallized it intoharsh law and harsher custom; while the mar- vellous pushing forward of thepoor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths ofthe heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the largerproblem of Negro education sprang up the more practi- cal question of work, theinevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slaveryto freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,lawlessness and ruthless competition.
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The industrial school springing to notice in this decade,but coming to full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was theproffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and ananswer of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all theschools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now wasthis training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch withthe South's magnificent industrial development, and given an emphasis whichreminded black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates ofToil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning oureyes from the temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broaderquestion of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America,we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mountsto its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and suffi- cientanswer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in allsincerity, the ever-recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat,and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerlybecause of sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency ishere, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism ofthe day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to betrained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keepbrown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard asuseful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambitionand sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hearthat an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of idealsand seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is theprivilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the formereducational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, wefind first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparationof teachers for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansionof that school system amid increasing difficulties; and finally the training ofworkmen for the new and growing industries. This
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development has been sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversalof nature. Soothly we have been told that first industrial and manual trainingshould have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taughthim to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools couldhave completed the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historicallyimpossible, it needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairsis more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, andthe lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities centuries before thecommon schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. Soin the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked theintelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the commonschool to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higherschools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white teachers whoflocked South went to establish such a common-school system. Few held the ideaof founding colleges; most of them at first would have laughed at the idea. Butthey faced, as all men since them have faced, that central paradox of theSouth, -- the social separation of the races. At that time it was the suddenvolcanic rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work andgovernment and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations ineconomic and political affairs has grown up, -- an adjustment subtle anddifficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightfulchasm at the color-line across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then andnow, there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply inthe higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, onrailway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections,in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards.There is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation, butthe separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for thepresent between the races anything like that sympathetic and effectivegroup-training and leadership of the
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one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must havefor effectual progress.
This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effectiveindustrial and trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of acommon-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could befounded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would notteach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If theNegro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help thatcould be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers.This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situationuntil simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation orsystematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnishteachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defectsof this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a singlegeneration they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped outthe illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they madeTuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepenbroader development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then somebecame high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year ormore of studies of college grade. This development was reached with differentdegrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is still a high school,while Fisk University started her college in 1871, and Spelman Seminary about1896. In all cases the aim was identical, -- to maintain the standards of thelower training by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training;and above all, to furnish the black world with adequate standards of humanculture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers ofteachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so faras possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilizationamong a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in theSouth began with higher institutions of training, which threw off as theirfoliage common schools, and later industrial schools,
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and at the same time strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college anduniversity training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development,sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, aquestion in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if the highertraining was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound methods. Amongwhite Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southernjournal voiced this in a recent editorial.
"The experiment that has been made to give thecolored students classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though manywere able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and importof their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable oc-cupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a waste of time,efforts, and the money of the state."
While most fair-minded men would recognize this asextreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there asufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant theundertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Doesit not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment?And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot beevaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negroability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patientopenness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer allqueries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that humancourtesy can do is to listen to evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro wouldbe the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the presentsystem: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work insome cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality hassometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughoutthe land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, andleaves the deeper question of the legitimate demand for the higher training ofNegroes untouched. And this latter question can be settled in but one
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way, -- by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view allinstitutions which have not actually graduated students from a course higherthan that of a New England high school, even though they be called colleges; ifthen we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up manymisapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are they?what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?
And first we may say that this type of college, includingAtlanta, Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, ispeculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as Iwrite, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave,which graduates of Atlanta University have placed there, --
"GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER
AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED,
AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
MIGHT BE BLESSED."
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: notalms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money theseseething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating withred blood; -- a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring tothe masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children inthe crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one ofthe few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers inthese institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raisethem out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. Thecolleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sonsof the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions ofNew England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped andharkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum wasdoubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it wasthe contact of living souls.
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From such schools about two thousand Negroes have goneforth with the bachelor's degree. The number in itself is enough to put at restthe argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving highertraining. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land,in both college and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assuresus "it must be increased to five times its present average" to equalthe average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in anyappre- ciable numbers to master a modern college course would have beendifficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes,many of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received thebachelor's degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leadingcolleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, ofwhom the crucial query must be made, How far did their training fit them forlife? It is of course extremely difficult to collect satisfactory data on sucha point, -- difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and togauge that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900,the Conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, andpublished the results. First they sought to know what these graduates weredoing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the liv- ing.The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the reports of thecolleges where they graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy ofcredence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were teachers, -- presidentsof institutions, heads of normal schools, principals of city school- systems,and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per centwere in the professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent weremerchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the governmentcivil- service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the thirdunheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness. Personally Iknow many hundreds of these graduates, and have corresponded with more than athousand; through others I have followed carefully the life-work of scores; Ihave taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have taught, lived inhomes which they have builded, and
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looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my fellowstudents in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowherehave I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeperdevotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to succeedin the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. Theyhave, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-wells, their pedants andlettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; theyhave not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate withuniversity men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from culturedhomes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape acertain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility,these men have usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldombeen agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have workedsteadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers,they have given the South a commendable system of city schools and largenumbers of private normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men haveworked side by side with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from thebeginning the backbone of Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed ofgraduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled withcollege graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacherof agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a majorityof the heads of departments. In the professions, college men are slowly butsurely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastationsof disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty andproperty of the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it ifNegroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully forit? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, minis- ters, lawyers,and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number ofNegro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that highertraining, the end of which is culture, and if the
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two and a half thousand who have had something of this training in the pasthave in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, thequestion then comes, What place in the future development of the South oughtthe Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present socialseparation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influencesof culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformationcalls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast soreis progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united ineconomic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought andfeeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper humanintimacy, -- if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amidpeace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call forsocial surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It willdemand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its finalaccomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are con-cerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happyrenaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices thatcry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent orantagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no securecivilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulentproletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothingmore: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they willnot cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world.By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the doorof opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you makethem satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leadingfrom the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? Weought not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite theactive discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for highertraining steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the years from1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges;
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from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates.From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413,and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; byrefusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane manimagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly becomehewers of wood and drawers of water?
No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's positionwill more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth andmore intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it solargely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste ofenergy cannot he spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And asthe black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guidedin its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and thecreeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge andthrows its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day themasses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position andthe moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments againstthem, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, haveburning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O SouthernGentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? Whenyou cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legalmarriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. Andif in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also infury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done againsthelpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheadsof two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally,when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer thatslavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions;that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this landreceive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified, -- Iwill
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not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of thenine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of thecradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise ofterrible truth. I insist that the question of the future is how best to keepthese millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficultiesof the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerfulstriving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster,and fuller future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closerknitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is agreat truth. And this the common schools and the manual training and tradeschools are working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. Thefoundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in thecollege and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internalproblems of social advance must inevitably come, -- problems of work and wages,of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life;and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meetand solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be anypossible solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the richexperience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis,infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallowthinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have witenough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfullybetween the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly induce black men tobelieve that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains.They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toiland dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving,reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated bytraining and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: itmust maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the socialregeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of racecontact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.Above our
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modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolvethat higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must comea loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself andthe world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self- development;that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old andnew. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be notwholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing ofblack men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, theunknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they haveseen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, anddoing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days thattry their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is totheir finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by beingblack.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across thecolor line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men andwelcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swingbetween the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summonAristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously withno scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is thisthe life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to changeinto the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering fromthis high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?