Does he really overhear it—­that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoarse cities, out of the slow, patient fields, to God?

Does he overhear it, I wonder?  What does he make out that we are like?

I should think it would sound like music to him.

It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his God (and will he not please be alone with his God sometimes?), like some vast ocean of people singing, a kind of multitudinous, faraway singing, like the wind—­ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by!

I do not see how a President could help growing a little like a poet—­down in his heart—­as he listens.

If he does, he may do as he will with us.

We will let him be an artist in a nation.

As Winslow Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the crowd’s imagination with itself—­in making a nation self-conscious.

He shall be the artist, the composer, the portrait painter of the people—­their faith, their cry, their anger, and their love shall be in him.  In him shall be seen the panorama of the crowd, focused into a single face.  In him there shall be put in the foreground of this nation’s countenance the things that belong in the foreground.  And the things that belong in the background shall be put in the background, and the little ideas and little men shall look little in it, and the big ones shall look big.

They do not look so now.  This is the one thing that is the matter with America.  The countenence of the nation is not a composed countenance.  All that we want is latent in us, everything is there in our Washington face.  The face merely lacks features and an expression.

This is what a President is for—­to give at last the Face of the United States an expression!

If he is a shrewd poet and believes in us, we shall accept him as the official mind reader of the nation.  He focuses our desires.  In the weariness of the day he looks away—­he looks up—­he leans his head upon his hand—­through the corridors of his brain, that little silent Main street of America, the thoughts and the crowds and the jostling wills of the people go.

If he is a shrewd poet about us, he becomes the organic function, the organizer of the news about our people to ourselves.  He is the public made visible, the public made one.  He is a moving picture of us.  He speaks and gestures the United States—­if he is a poet about us—­when he beckons or points or when he puts his finger on his lips, or when he says, “Hush!” or when he says, “Wait a moment!” he is the voice of the people of the United States.

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