And then so many of the old guard were dead. A strange and tragic fate had pursued us, overtaking, one after another, our very best--Jones, first of all, and then Oren Dunham, E. B. Southard, Dad McCullough, Franklin Macomber, Lyman Wachenheimer, Dr. Donnelly, William H. Maher. These brave, true souls were literally burned out in the fires of that fierce and relentless conflict, and then there came that soft autumn night when seven of our young men in a launch were run down by a freighter on Maumee Bay and drowned, every one of them. I shall never forget Johnson Thurston as he sat in my office during that last campaign, recalling these men who had been to him as comrades in arms, and, what affected him more sorely, the fact that in our overabundant political success the ideals that had beckoned them on had become blurred in the vision of those who came after them. I detected him in the act of drawing his handkerchief furtively from his pocket, and hastily pressing it to his eyes, as he stammered something in apology for his emotion.... Thus there came the irresistible conviction that the work of the politician was not for me. There was other work I wished to do. I doubt whether the politician’s work is ever permanent, though it is too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the artist’s work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions, and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures, Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo; Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici, or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their names made illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous