work for him; the whole radical tide was flowing behind him; his unique function, meanwhile, was not political but spiritual. It was the creation, the communication of what he called “the allure of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling and feeling given fiber and outline by intelligence.” Was it not to have been hoped, therefore, that he would have revived, exemplified among these new revolutionary conditions, and on behalf of them, the lapsed rôle of the man of letters? For if he held a hammer in one hand, he held in the other a divining-rod. He, if any one, in the days to come, would have conjured out of our dry soil the green shoots of a beautiful and a characteristic literature: he knew that soil so well, and why it was dry, and how it ought to be irrigated! We have had no chart of our cultural situation to compare with his “History of a Literary Radical,” and certainly no one has combined with an analytical gift like his, and an adoration for the instinct of workmanship, so burning an eye for every stir of life and color on the drab American landscape. I think of a sentence in one of his reviews: “The appearance of dramatic imagination in any form in this country is something to make us all drop our work and run to see.” That was the spirit which animated all his criticism: is it not the spirit that creates out of the void the thing it contemplates? To have known Randolph Bourne is indeed to have surprised some of the finest secrets of the American future. But those who lived with him in friendship will remember him for reasons that are far more personal, and at the same time far more universal, than that: they will remember him as the wondrous companion, the lyrical intellect, the transparent idealist, most of all perhaps as the ingenuous and lonely child. It is said that every writer possesses in his vocabulary one talismanic word which he repeats again and again, half unconsciously, like a sort of signature, and which reveals the essential secret of his personality. In Bourne’s case the word is “wistful”; and those who accused him of malice and bitterness, not realizing how instinctively we impute these qualities to the physically deformed who are so dauntless in spirit that they repel our pity, would do well to consider that secret signature, sown like some beautiful wild flower over the meadow of his writings, which no man can counterfeit, which is indeed the token of their inviolable sincerity. He was a wanderer, the child of some nation yet unborn, smitten with an inappeasable nostalgia for the Beloved Community on the far side of socialism, he carried with him the intoxicating air of that community, the mysterious aroma of all its works and ways. “High philosophic thought infused with sensuous love,” he wrote once, “is not this the one incorrigible dream that clutches us?” It was the dream he had brought back from the bright future in