On Workmanship

Excerpt from On Workmanship

Love, Beauty, Dawn, Life, Peace, are words no longer, but the very stuff of poetry. They are living things, quick with the dreams and longings of a myriad lives, and they speak with intensity of meaning to each of us. They are not words, but codes, not sounds merely, but symphonies. Besides these, which are universal symbols, we have each of us our own key-words. Words which seem to resume and express the essence of what we think and feel. To most of us, the word workmanship is such a key-word. Almost all that we could desire for ourselves, our nation and the world, has its root or origin in workmanship. All education should be based on it. Every ideal directed to it; all life lived for it. And why? Because it means the state or condition or art of shaping. Because it means creation. Because creation, in the world of thought and action, is the continu ance of that impulse which shapes the stars and sways the suns.