Freedom, Truth and Beauty | Page 7

75
All Luminaires Have One Trend
76
Life Takes Morning Hues with the Arts of Peace
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U. S. Senator James A. O. Gorman and the Stalwarts
77
Minister of Justice Palmer, A Bastile Builder
77
A Speck, But Not a Stain, Harvard
78
Supreme Court Justice Charles L. Guy
78

Rear Admiral Sims
79
Saint George and the Dragon
79
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE QUALITY OF THE WORKS OF EDWARD DOYLE
The quality of Edward Doyle's work was appraised by Ella Wheeler
Wilcox in the following article by Mrs. Wilcox which appeared in the
New York Evening Journal and the San Francisco _Examiner_, in
1905:
Shut your eyes and bind them with a black cloth and try for one hour to
see how cheerful you can be. Then imagine yourself deprived for life of
the light of day.
Perhaps this experiment will make you less rebellious with your present
lot.
Then take the little book called "The Haunted Temple and Other
Poems," by Edward Doyle, the blind poet of Harlem, and read and
wonder and feel ashamed of any mood of distrust of God and
discontent with life you have ever indulged.
Mr. Doyle has been blind for the last thirty-seven years; he has lived a
half century.
Therefore he still remembers the privilege of seeing God's world when
a lad, and this must augment rather than ameliorate his sorrow.
He who has never known the use of eyes cannot fully understand the
immensity of the loss of sight.
I hear people in possession of all their senses, and with many blessings,
bewail the fact that they were ever born.

They have missed some aim, failed of some cherished ambition, lost
some special joy or been defeated in some purpose.
A GREAT SOUL
And so they sit in spiritual darkness and curse life and doubt God. But
here is a great soul who has found his divine self in the darkness and
who sends out this wonderful song of joy and gratitude.
Read it, oh, ye weak repiners, and read it again and again. It is beautiful
in thought, perfect in expression and glorious with truth.
CHIME, DARK BELL
My life is in deep darkness; still, I cry,
With joy to my Creator, "It is
well!"
Were worlds my words, what firmaments would tell
My
transport at the consciousness that I
Who was not, Am! To be--oh,
that is why
The awful convex dark in which I dwell
Is tongued with
joy, and chimes a temple bell.
Antiphonally to the choirs on high!

Chime cheerily, dark bell! for were no more
Than consciousness my
gift, this were to know
The Giver Good--which sums up all the lore

Eternity can possibly bestow.
Chime! for thy metal is the molten ore

Of the great stars, and marks no wreck below.
I know a gifted and brilliant man in New York who is full of charm and
wit in conversation, but the moment he touches a pen he becomes, as a
rule, a melancholy pessimist, crying out at the injustice of the world
and the uselessness of high endeavor in the field of art.
When urged to take a different mental attitude for the sake of the
reading world, which needs strong tonics of hope and courage, rather
than the