that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, in a fathomless pool. This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time. In time, he may be Slav or English, but certainly is modern of the moderns. The tribute of admiration and imitation from the youth of his own period alone might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imagination afield into the margins of the world, where life still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from Kipling or Masefield. To say that he strikes below the act and the will into realms of the sub- conscious, and studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion, is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among the many writers who have learned of Henry James or moved in parallels beside him. To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential modernity I should like to propose a more cogent comparison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man whose achievements were in Conrad's own province, who challenges and rewards comparison, Herman Melville. It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside the works of Conrad. Some one must have done it, so illuminating in both directions is the result. Here are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and description unsurpassed: And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw.