In Connection With The De Willoughby Claim

Chapter 24

For an imaginative or an untravelled person to approach the city of Washington at sunrise on a radiant morning, is a thing far from unlikely to be remembered, since a white and majestic dome, rising about a white structure set high and supported by stately colonnades, the whole gleaming fair against a background of blue sky, forms a picture which does not easily melt away.

Those who reared this great temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop to rule and watch over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force