Remember again that what is and what is promised have come in a lifetime.
Walking in the streets of that city early one morning a few years ago, as
the trains were emptying the throngs who sleep outside along the lake and
out on the prairie, into the canyons made by its tall buildings, I found
myself immediately behind a robust old man, a civil engineer, who was born
before Chicago had a hundred inhabitants. He was much older than the city
whose buildings now reach out miles from the lake (one of its streets
thirty-two miles long) and thirty and forty stories into the air. One
hundred years ago it was the French wilderness untouched. Eighty years ago
most of its citizens bore French names. The portage path has literally
yielded a harvest of streets.
Chicago, the city of the French portage, Chicago, which despite all that
casual visitors see and say of it, was, I contend, best defined by Harriet
Martineau as a "great, embryo poet," moody, wild, but bringing about
results, exulting that he--for he is a masculine poet--has caught the true
spirit of things of the past and has had sight of the depths of futurity.
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