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The inspiration for the capitol as a whole was Bertram Goodhue’s. He
first ran an architect’s pencil around its noble contours, in a moment
of exaltation flinging its tower toward to stars. But death drew the
pencil from his hand while many markings were yet to be made.
It is said that for no other building since the middle ages has such a
definite, complete and comprehensive symbolic scheme been worked
out—giving complete unity to the finished edifice. To Mr. Goodhue’s
immediate associates, of course, goes a great deal of the credit for the
capitol. William Younkin has been the supervising architect. Among
others who had a large part in the perfecting of the building are Lee
Lawrie, the sculptor, Hildreth Meiere, responsible for its mosaics, and
Hartley Burr Alexander, who planned the sculpture, wrote the
inscriptions and worked out the art symbolism.
The late Dr. Alexander, native of Lincoln and professor of philosophy at
the University of Nebraska until he went to Scripps college in 1927, was
familiar to two generations of students in Lincoln. A mild retiring
person with a furiously intellectual brow, he possessed great ability in
the field of poetry and philosophy, writing perhaps twenty books on
these subjects. The inscriptions of the building read unhurriedly along
its vast corridors, beginning with the hymn of the Navajo, imprinted on
the buffalo at the north entrance: “In Beauty I walk. With Beauty before
me I walk. With Beauty behind me I walk, with Beauty above and about me
I walk.”