Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/174

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THE PATH OF VISION

times of stress and storm, it never fails ultimately of its purpose.

For the national spirit in its purity and vigor, is the spirit of individuals representative of its traditions and its culture. This is so even in America, despite the deafening noise of its colossal machinery. Like Greece and Rome, America is developing itself from a conflux of various nations and antithetical elements. The Melting Pot certainly has a soul. And this soul will certainly have a voice. And the voice of America, it can safely be said without exaggerating potentialities, is destined to become the voice of the world. Its culture, too, its arts and its traditions, which, in spite of the present passion of Americanization, are being colored and shaded, impregnated with alien influences, will embody the noblest expression of truth and beauty that the higher spirit of the Orient and the Occident combined is capable of conceiving. They will embody also a universal consciousness, multifarious, multicolor, prismatic.

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