But it is only now that the brooding poet is coming to express himself in
verses that are recognized for their beauty.
Chicago, the field of the wild onions, threaded by La Riviere de l'Ail,
the place of the shambles, the capital of the golden calf. That is her
fame.
Only recently I read in a book which I found in Paris, written by an
English traveller, that Chicago stands apart from all other cities in that
"her people are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent as she
is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too busy money-making to
attend to civic improvements" or to have a "keen affection for worthier
things."
I have gone a hundred times in and out of that dirty, unkempt city, swept
only by the winds, one would think, and I know its worst, its physical,
moral, political worst. But if the people there have worshipped the golden
calf in their wilderness, they have now drunk of the dust of their first
image, and I should be disposed to say that nowhere among American cities
is there a keener affection for worthier things showing itself.
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