Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
Another newcomer, Margaret Evans, is a Christian Science Reader. She is
beautiful, in this day, and though she does not speak of her mirror in
2018, as does the headlong Jewish boy, I know she will always be
beautiful in body and soul. She has fathomed the holy grace and immortal
gladness of her teaching, and I can well believe she is immortal in this
place, under our oak and apple trees.
Still another is a Springfield Negress who is a preacher among her own
people. She has not a single Caucasian contour to her face or figure,
yet all the world must admit that Daisy Pearl Johnson is beautiful as
she is divinely young. She is “black but comely,” according to the
scripture. And she is eager in all the matters of the mind and spirit.
Another prophet, Nathaniel Davidson, gathers several denominations under
one temporary roof, and preaches to them about hell. He was once a Y. M.
C. A. physical director, and he ranges in attributes from Caliban to
higher things, and looks much like Douglas Fairbanks and William. A.
Sunday. He receives an invitation to join the Prognosticator’s Club.
Then there is a woman who was a welfare worker in France. Ruth Everett
has such a sleek and sophisticated grace, and her face is so snobbish
yet so Alexandrian Greek that I have often called her “The Daughter of
Lysippus.” In every line is the elegance that old sculptor might have
loved. In pomp, upon her throne, and she makes any chair her throne, she
is like “Sara Siddons as the Tragic Muse” as painted by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
And here you have men and women who see the vision, each in a strange
and mystical fashion.
CHAPTER III
HOW PEOPLE OF 1920 THINK THE GOLDEN BOOK WILL COME IN 2018
When we, the Prognosticator’s Club, come together for our meetings it is
inevitable that our talk should be of the Springfield of our fancy and
of the manner in which the vision has come to each one.
The first to testify, when we call the members together in the Sun
Parlor of the Leland Hotel is the young Campbellite minister. He tells
us of a dream that has come to him on many evenings by his study fire.
In a vision he is reborn three or four generations in the future. He is
a priest of the Catholic Church. He is known as St. Friend, the Giver of
Bread. He is almost alone in a vast Gothic Cathedral. He is astonished
to find himself changed in body, conviction, and habit from all his
former routine, but enough memory remains for the comparison, and he
knows he is still himself. But of this another time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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