Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade later than Mr. Hardy's earlier novels. It thrills one's literary pulse now to look back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, a boy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting to hundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds also of a life's work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent! The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, past calculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the True Romance." It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit of his work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has accumulated on this wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higher imagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, or Kim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the Roman Wall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lends actual life and speech, he carries through all the great company the flag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance." It was Meredith's flag, and Stevenson's and Scott's--it comes handed down in an endless chain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have taken undisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most that literary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watch and rejoice in Rudyard Kipling's work may be counted among those gifts of the gods which bring no Nemesis with them. Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--was rising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling's. _The Window in Thrums_ appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the French masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, _Pêcheur d'Islande._ Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift making for the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the True Romance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service.