book; and when you’ve said something so directly that “it can never again be said” it will have its effect, and when you’ve made a contribution to pure thought it’s bound to have its effect for it’s the confusion of tongues that keeps even the other kind (not impure but unpure thought) from having its effect somewhere in an ineffectual world—aside from the effect it will have on the world look at the impetus it gives you. Here are you with twelve pages that you can tuck under your arm any time, day or the black night between days, and march straight up to heaven’s gate and demand a reckoning on. The end? when you’ve here said twelve times over, for the first time, absolutely that it’s ever been perfectly said: “No compromise”! Would to God some judge—(he will; they will,—I was near showing a lack of faith in the power of this thing you’ve done)—some judge _will_ step down from his bench and leave a sentence unpronounced because the law shan’t bind him to injustice. Some preacher _will_ come to his pulpit with his manuscript a blank because he can’t compel his hand to write more platitudes. A thousand artist hands will break the thing they’ve chiseled at, and search their souls with yearning for the thing they are. The end? This will be quoted. I refrain from mentioning the time when all else is pied, including magazine magpies, and when the arch-fiend has gathered disloyal architects and all their works. This says: “Life is long.” This denies all that the poets have sung, and the prophets have wailed and philosophy has deluded us with. If the poets have gathered rosebuds while they may, this makes no haste to gather thistles. If the Jeremiahs have said Woe! Woe! this says “Whoa” once and compels it; and the philosophy of this thing, instead of dividing art from its essence and proclaiming that art is long and life is short, identifies life and art and says they’re both long—long enough. Life is long enough for art—just. For art proves itself worthy only as the work of the artist proves him able to work true while he lives and proves him great in so far as his record shows him able to live true while he works. Dauber was all wrong, if art is achievement, or he could never have had it in him to do the thing he was to do and yet lose his grip on the yard-arm however the wind blew; but he was right, whether of life or of art, in his dying cry “It will go on.” He knew you.