BRILLIANTS FROM THE TOWER OF JEWELS
If God is light, Edison and his disciples must have glimpsed some of His glory.
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"They shall splash at a ten league canvas with brushes of comet hair."—Kipling's words that might be used in describing Jules Guerin's masterful work in painting a thousand acre canvas.
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"Fair city of the sun, laved by the blue seas, glowing like a topaz within a setting of dark cradling streets, that rose tier on tier around it."—Whitaker's impression of the Exposition received upon entering the Golden Gate from the sea.
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The creamy surface of the tower of jewels is studded with 125,000 great glass jewels made in Austria and safely landed in this country, which with the floods of light diffusing from concealed sources, creates an illumination that is peculiarly impressive against the background of the night's sky and often makes the Exposition grounds lighter by day than by night.
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If Whitman was right when he said "dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sunrise out of me," then we do not exaggerate in saying that the sunlight has partly spoken through the builders of the Jewel City.
THE JEWEL CITY
Mystically inspired,
Amazingly patient, tireless suppliants for the vision
You have caught the ray of a true, a far distant light.
And these palaces and pillars let them crumble when they their days have fulfilled.
For in mind and in soul you have agonized and struggled,
Until triumphantly you have evoked the very stones into utterance.
And through that which decays you have spoken the eternal and the undecaying thought.
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Well done, master-minded builders.
For the world mind, geographically at least, it has conquered!
And through this miracle of color companioning the hosts of the nations about the universe's court,
With a modern Prometheus banishing the night,
You are radiating the contagion of the triumph to the land and the sea.
For looking southward in a vision—
The architects and sculptors have seen the first rush of the hemispheric waters, victoriously intermingling.
And lo, the inspiration of an isthmian genius has here become the inspiration and joy of a race.
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And the races—
Hear the dialects, see the people—
Now catching the world thought they hunger for brotherhood.
And even while they laugh for brotherhood they pray
For they are groping
And inaudibly they are praying for more planetary builders,
To express the growing consciousness of the international mind,
As here materially in stone and in mortar,
So invisibly in governments and a new world order,
And in a brotherhood, large minded and interracial in its scope.
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And we believe
That the God of the United Seas will hear their petition in His way.
For as intently we gaze, we can see
That this apocalypse of light and color, directing upward and sympathizing throng-ward
Prophesies that the races are divinely to be led into essential unity.
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And even more, O path-finders![B]
We seem to see, the very pillars—emblematic of a holy shaft of light—gathering here.
Radiating not only towards the skys;
But also hovering, hovering, hovering, as if preparing, when the festive days are o'er.
To guide to democracy's sacred task across the highways of the seas.
THE VOICES OF TWO CITIES
Two cities on the Western coast are heralding to the world the triumphant completion of the Panama canal. And if a certain writer is right in saying that there are seven wonders of the modern world—telephone, wireless, aeroplane, radium, and antisceptics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis and X-rays—as there were seven wonders of the ancient world, we can well add that the Panama canal is the eighth modern wonder and that it is the wonder of all wonders, ancient and modern.
And it is well that nearly a year is to be given by both cities to the commemoration of this event in order that the whole world may fully feel the significance of this remarkable engineering feat to its whole life.
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition held at San Francisco, from February 20 to December 4, 1915, is the national celebration authorized and sanctioned and partly financed by the government of the United States, the total investment being $50,000,000. The Exposition area covers 635 acres of ground, having a frontage of two miles on the bay immediately inside of the Golden Gate. The grounds are divided into three main divisions; the foreign section nearest to the Golden Gate, the central portion with its exhibit palaces and great Tower of Jewels rising 435 feet high and the eastern section for rest and amusement. In keeping with the world consciousness four courts are found on the grounds; the Court of the Four Seasons; Court of the Universe; Court of Abundance; Court of Palms; Court of Flowers. Every state and territory in the Union has made exhibits and in spite of the world war more than forty foreign countries are represented and co-operating in the commemoration of this most historic event.
The Panama-California Exposition is held at San Diego, California, throughout the year 1915, for which the sum of $3,500,000 was raised. The grounds are embraced within a fourteen-acre park, known as "Balboa Park," being at the very heart of the city of San Diego. The Exposition is international in its scope and has exhibits from all the American countries and from some of the European and oriental nations. It has an exhibit showing the progress of man from primitive times up to the present; and also some beautiful floral and horticultural exhibits, which are making both of the expositions most attractive, many of the tourists going south from San Francisco in order that they may participate in both celebrations.
