Page:Americans (1922).djvu/254

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

tion in the more characteristic reflection that. The Hights was just the right setting for a man like him. His primary purpose there was not to follow any gainful occupation, but to live as all poetic Utopians have held that a man should live, toiling a couple of hours each day at honest labor of the hands and devoting the rest of life to love, friendship, art, and preaching the gospel of beauty. The literary expression of his dream appears in The Building of the City Beautiful, 1893, a Utopian romance obviously related to the writings of Ruskin and William Morris, but apparently inspired directly by Miller's conversations with a Jewish radical in Palestine. He had it in mind also to gather around him like-minded workers and friends, who should give to the world below them an illustration of the felicity in store for humanity when the base passions which now govern society are eradicated. Several young poets and artists came to him and tarried for a time in his guest-house, moved by curiosity or the hopes of youth—among them several Japanese, including Yone Noguchi. And students from the University in Berkeley and travellers from remoter places made little pilgrimages up into the hills to visit this romantically costumed poet and seer who had fought with Indians and now preached universal peace. To his disciples and lovers he lectured in a somewhat oracular tone on the laws of the new American poetry, on the conduct of life, and