It might be guessed from this that Bourne at thirty-two had not quite found himself. His interests were indeed almost universal: he had written on politics, economics, philosophy, education, literature. No other of our younger critics had cast so wide a net, and Bourne had hardly begun to draw the strings and count and sort his catch. He was a working journalist, a literary freelance with connections often of the most precarious kind, who contrived, by daily miracles of audacity and courage, to keep himself serenely afloat in a society where his convictions prevented him from following any of the ordinary avenues of preferment and recognition. It was a feat never to be sufficiently marvelled over; it would have been striking, in our twentieth century New York, even in the case of a man who was not physically handicapped as Bourne was. But such a life is inevitably scattering, and it was only after the war had literally driven him in upon himself that he set to work at the systematic harvesting of his thoughts and experiences. He had not quite found himself, perhaps, owing to the extraordinary range of interests for which he had to find a personal common denominator; yet no other young American critic, I think, had exhibited so clear a tendency, so coherent a body of desires. His personality was not only unique, it was also absolutely expressive. I have had the delightful experience of reading through at a sitting, so to say, the whole mass of his uncollected writings, articles, essays, book reviews, unprinted fragments, and a few letters, and I am astonished at the way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor of the man spreads itself over every paragraph. Here was no anonymous reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the singing line of an intense and beautiful desire.