everything, in the warm,
rich earth. He had stood unknowing, he had walked and worked where it
was buried, and the fact itself, the fact of his fortune, would have
been a barren fact enough if the first sharp tender shoot had never
struggled into day. There on one side was the ugliness his middle time
had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents, was the
beauty with which his age might still be crowned. He was happier,
doubtless, than he deserved; but THAT, when one was happy at all, it
was easy to be. He had wrought by devious ways, but he had reached the
place, and what would ever have been straighter, in any man's life,
than his way, now, of occupying it? It hadn't merely, his plan, all the
sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed,
concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock--a
house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty
millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the
land. In this house, designed as a gift, primarily, to the people of his
adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the
bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure--in this museum of
museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple
was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his
spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said,
for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final
rites.

These would be the "opening exercises," the august dedication of the
place. His imagination, he was well aware, got over the ground faster
than his judgment; there was much still to do for the production of his
first effect. Foundations were laid and walls were rising, the structure
of the shell all determined; but raw haste was forbidden him in a
connection so intimate with the highest effects of patience and piety;
he should belie himself by completing without a touch at least of the
majesty of delay a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the
exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price. He was far
from knowing as yet where he would end, but he was admirably definite
as to where he wouldn't begin. He wouldn't begin with a small show--he
would begin with a great, and he could scarce have indicated, even had
he wished to try, the line of division he had drawn. He had taken no
trouble to indicate it to his fellow-citize