Finally, through Bourne more than through any other of our younger writers one gained a sense of the stir of the great world, of the currents and cross-currents of the contemporary European spirit, behind and beneath the war, of the tendencies and experiences and common aims and bonds of the younger generation everywhere. He was an exception to what seems to be the general rule, that Americans who are able to pass outside their own national spirit at all are apt to fall headlong into the national spirit of some one other country: they become vehement partisans of Latin Europe, or of England, or of Germany and Scandinavia, or, more recently, of Russia. Bourne, with that singular union of detachment and affectionate penetration which he brought also to his personal relationships, had entered them all with an equal curiosity, an impartial delight. If he had absorbed the fine idealism of the English liberals, he understood also the more elemental, the more emotional, the more positive urge of revolutionary Russia. He was full of practical suggestions from the vast social and economic laboratory of modern Germany. He had caught something also from the intellectual excitement of young Italy; most of all, his imagination had been captivated, as we can see from such essays as “Mon Amie,” by the candor and the self-consciousness and the genius for social introspection of radical France. And all these influences were perpetually at play in his mind and in his writings. He was the conductor of innumerable diverse inspirations, a sort of clearing-house of the best living ideas of the time; through him the young writer and the young thinker came into instant contact with whatever in the modern world he most needed. And here again Bourne revealed his central aim. He reviewed by choice, and with a special passion, what he called the “epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire.” It is easy to see, in his articles on such books as “Pelle the Conqueror” and Gorky’s Autobiography and “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,” that what lured him was the common struggle and aspiration of youth and poverty and the creative spirit everywhere, the sense of a new socialized world groping its way upward. It was this rich ground-note in all his work that made him, not the critic merely, but the leader.