The St. Johns Herald

Pleasing Event.

Besides being an apostle Utah's dominant church. Elder Orson F. Whitney is the leading poet of the Latter Day Saint church. This spring he finished writing a poem of book length which he is still revising. Tuesday evening at the home of President Udall he read the production to 120 invited guests. It was the greatest literary treat in the history of St. Johns.

The new production is not named beyond "An Idyll of the Westland" and it required two hours and twenty minutes to read it.

It is a love story in which the unnamed heroine is a highly educated western girl of atheistic tendencies, while the hero is a graduate of Harvard University but a firm Christian. He loves her and desires her hand in marriage, but she refuses all his advances from having no desire for marriage and no admiration for one who believes in the divinity of Jesus or the prophets, tho she believes He is a great teacher.

After pursuing an intellectual course for a short time she sees the futility of it and yields her heart to love. An illness comes on and she is converted to the divinity of Jesus. Her lover is absent as a soldier in the Philippines and returns only to find her illness fatal, and to make a pledge of eternal union.

The poem is filled with the loftiest sentiments and gems of English diction. It has in it a sublime metaphor describing our petrified forest and another of equal beauty on the Grand Canyon. There are dilations on the nobility of a teacher, the sweetness of love, the greatness of Christianity, the necessity of prophecy, the shallowness of atheism and others of minor mention.

As a reader Mr. Whitney is far above any ever heard in St. Johns, and one of the best in the Rocky mountains. His reading will be long remembered in old St. Johns.

Vocal solos by Mrs. Josephine Patterson, J. Alfred Anderson and Miss Thurza Brown, piano solo by Miss Lettie Anderson and a number by the orchestra were the musical numbers accompanying the reading.