Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1893 — THE COURT OF HONOR. [ARTICLE]

THE COURT OF HONOR.

A Beautiful Expression of the Popular Sentiment. Chicago Inter-Ocean. Had it been possible to make a true prognosis of the airiness, the grandeur, the delicacy, and the majesty of the quadrangle that fitly is known and forever shall be known as the Court of Honor, the Nation would not have permitted it to have been built of perishable stuff. Were the work of exposition building to do again it would be insisted that at least the Court of Honor should be constructed of age-enduring marble. Millions would be spent well in perpetuating this enchanting and sublime architecture. What moods it has! The hot sun talik on it from a cloudless sky and it shines a silver group worthy of the mansions of the blest, the lake gleaming through the peristyle and suggesting the perennial plenteousness and coolness of “the river of the water of life." The wind grows cold, the skies are overcast, the sun is obscured, and the ponderous masses array themselves in stubborn resistance to the unkindly elements and loom as though they were, what, alas! they are not —eternal granite, rooted and fixed in earth, but strong enough to repel the storms and fires of heaven. Never before was such masonry and such grouping of masonry imagined, far less executed. The Court of Honor is delicate enough to be the palace of the gentlest-and most beautiful of disembodied spirits of Titania, of Astarte, of chaste Diana, or of that higher class intelligence “angels ever bright and fair,” and it is also grand enough to be the abode si Jupiter Tonans. It is so grand, so really yet so unreally grand, that one would be little astonished were he to see Venus rising from the spray of the fountain, or Neptune coming from the lake through the pillars of the peristyle, or —and we say it reverently —Archangel Gabriel gazing with admiration on the colossal virgin who personifies the Republic, and saluting her with, “Sister, it is well.” The religious sentiment is irrepressible when one meditates in the Court of Honor. A few paces them e and man, “less than half removed from the brute,” feeds in the Dahomeyan village; here man, “but a little lower than the angels,” has blended the ethereal and the massive in love-exciting, yet in awe-inspiring piles. And over the grand arch of the peristyle are inscripfions that tell how this has come about, and hint at how yet grander—though as yet unimaginable—things mav yet come about. There is Lincoln’s exhortation that we should'“highly resolve that government of, by and for the people shall not perish;” there is the definition of that liberty which Lincoln advised,us to cherish, and for which he gave his life, “Civil and religious liberty means the development of personal and National character”—and fronting the peristyle is the Court of Honor, that bears witness to a noble development of personal and National character through the agency of civil and religious liberty. And, lest one should fear that liberty shall fail, high over all are the assuring words of the heaven-born Teacher: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” As the Court of Honor is the hitherto climacteric result of search after and knowledge of the truth, so hereafter greater dis» plays await the unfleshed eyes of aL who seek and know. But the Court soon is to perish. Tennyson’s heartfelt cry, Oh. pull not down my towers that are So lightly, beautifully built! Is echoed by millions. But, had men known how grand it was to be, millions cheerfully would have been spent to give it so much of eternal duration as sublunary material and earth-born genius can give.