the cook and got everybody ready?

Theodore Roosevelt, singing a little roughly, possibly hurrahing "_I
will, I will, I won't, I won't_," and acting as if he believed in the
world.

Bryan in the village of Chicago sitting by at a reporter's table saw him
doing it.

Bryan saw how it worked.

Bryan had it in him too.

Bryan heard the shouts of the people across the land as they gloried in
the fight. He saw the signals from the nations over the sea.

Then Armageddon moved to Baltimore.

* * * * *

And now table is about to be spread.

It is to be Mr. Wilson's soup.

But the soup will have a Roosevelt flavour or tang to it. And we will
wait to see what Mr. Wilson will do with the other courses.

* * * * *

A poet in words, with two or three exceptions, America has not produced.

The only touch of poetry or art as yet that we have in America
is--acting as if we believed in people. This particular art is ours.
Other people may have it, but it is all we have.

This is what makes or may make any moment the common American a poet or
artist.

Speaking in this sense, Mr. Roosevelt is the first poet America has
produced that European peoples and European governments have noticed for
forty years, or had any reason to notice. We respectfully place Mr.
Roosevelt with Mr. McAdoo (and if Mr. Brandeis will pardon us, with Mr.
Brandeis) as a typical American before the eyes of the new President.
We ask him to take Mr. Roosevelt as a very important part of the latest
news about us.

The true imaginative men of our modern life, the poets of crowds and
cities are not to-day our authors, preachers, professors or lawyers or
philosophers. The poets of crowds are our men like this, our
vision-doers, the men who have seen visions and dreamed dreams in the
real and daily things, the daring Governors like Wilson and like Hughes,
the daring inventors of great business houses, the men who have invented
the foundations on which nations can stand, on which railroads can run,
the men whose imaginations, in the name of heaven, have played with the
earth mightily, watered deserts, sailed cities on the seas, the men who
have whistled and who have said "Come!" to empires, who have thought
hundred-year thoughts, taken out nine hundred and ninety-nine year
leases, who have thought of mighty ways for cities to live, for cities
to be cool, to be light, to be dark, who have conce