The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Brann is dead! But when Baylor University has sunk
beneath the wave of oblivion; when the very bones of the
splenetic-hearted hypocrites--who goaded to his death
the grandest man America has ever produced--have crumbled
into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust--
Brann's name will live--a beacon light for those who love
truth for truth's sake.
Brann is dead! The blow that wrung our hearts with
unavailing anguish but ushered him into the company of
Shakespeare, Carlyle, Hugo and Wagner. And there,
whether it be in the light that beats on God's great throne,
or in the serbonian darkness of a hell more horrible than
that pictured by Dante--is the true Heaven.--Abbott
Graphic.
* * *
BRANN'S BRAVE BATTLE.
With humble soul and heavy heart we take up our pen to
chronicle the death, yea the murder of one of the brightest
and purest noblemen that God ever created--W. C. Brann.
A few years ago he, W. H. Ward and the writer each
occupied desks, side by side, in the editorial rooms of The
Waco Morning News. There budded a friendship between
that trio that we full believe shall blossom into ripe
fraternal love on a shore as yet unknown to Mr. Ward and
the writer. Mr. Brann was editor of the ICONOCLAST,
and as its name indicates it is a smasher of idols from
Tadmor in the Wilderness to the mountains of Hepsedam.
Scorning the sensual, always against the vulgar, in much
the same manner as Carlyle, Brann stuck the gaffles of
truth deep into the sides of wrong in high places, and
exposed rottenness wherever found. With rugged English,
twisted into sentences more cutting than whips of
scorpions' tails, he stood up and fought for right as opposed
to might. He tore off the plaster of moral cancerous
ulcers, now so prolific on the body politic of the world,
and held high the treachery, the bigotry, the superstition,
the damnably dirty doings of a generation that accepts
hidebound dogmas for the ultima thule of reasoning and
truth; precept for right and in reality worships at the
shrine of exploded fables and crowns, by its own acts, the
parrot as its preceptor--lives and dies, having no desire
to do anything that somebody has not done before! Is
it any wonder that such a man as W. C. Brann should
fall a victim to such a populace? He was hounded to his
death--mobbed, spat upon, shot and murdered, by several
thousand pin-headed obstreperous patrons and followers
of a little pee-wee college, that turns young ladies out
enceinte almost yearly and hires its professors for less
salaries than a railroad brakeman gets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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