That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about--he will scarcely even interest himself in--any world but that which he has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience. Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books, animals, soldiers, workers--of all these things he will tell you with a tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his imagination. I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on: There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky. We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself: