And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of books. I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways and windows--for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint and tiny roar of London. I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they mould their thoughts. I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?... Here, where Shakespeare played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets, going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made one--lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men.... I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy out with his camera--his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day--big, curious tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K. Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting, rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon.... * * * * *