FLOUR MILLS, MINNEAPOLIS The mills of Minneapolis are as impressive as the cathedrals of France. There are places on the river where they group themselves into the same compositions, with the bridges below them, that I found years ago at Abli-only the color is different; the rosy red of the French brick is changed to dull concrete gray. The tree masses below are the same, and the old stone railroad bridge over the Mississippi is just as drawable as that over the Tarn. The beauty of the flour mills is the beauty of use-they carry out William Morris's theory that "everything useful should be beautiful"-but I don't know what he would have said of them. There are other subjects which recall Tivoli, where the streams gush out from the bluffs or tremble and rush and roar from dark caverns between the huge modern masses of masonry as finely as they do in far-away Italy. Those were the shrines of the gods-these are the temples of work, the temples of our time. |