What was that desire? It was for a new fellowship in the youth of America as the principle of a great and revolutionary departure in our life, a league of youth, one might call it, consciously framed with the purpose of creating, out of the blind chaos of American society, a fine, free, articulate cultural order. That, as it seems to me, was the dominant theme of all his effort, the positive theme to which he always returned from his thrilling forays into the fields of education and politics, philosophy and sociology. One finds it at the beginning of his career in such essays as “Our Cultural Humility,” one finds it at the end in the “History of a Literary Radical.” One finds it in that pacifism which he pursued with such an obstinate and lonely courage and which was the logical outcome of the checking and thwarting of those currents of thought and feeling in which he had invested the whole passion of his life. _Place aux jeunes_ might have been his motto: he seemed indeed the flying wedge of the younger generation itself. I shall never forget my first meeting with him, that odd little apparition with his vibrant eyes, his quick, birdlike steps and the long black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris. It was in November, 1914, and we never imagined then that the war was going to be more than a slash, however deep, across the face of civilization, we never imagined it was going to plough on and on until it had uprooted and turned under the soil so many green shoots of hope and desire in the young world. Bourne had published that radiant book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the _gaya scienza_, his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. One divined him in a moment, the fine, mettlesome temper of his intellect, his curiosity, his acutely critical self-consciousness, his aesthetic flair, his delicate sense of personal relationships, his toughness of fiber, his masterly powers of assimilation, his grasp of reality, his burning convictions, his beautifully precise desires. Here was Emerson’s “American scholar” at last, but radiating an infinitely warmer, profaner, more companionable influence than Emerson had ever dreamed of, an influence that savored rather of Whitman and William James. He was the new America incarnate, with that stamp of a sort of permanent youthfulness on his queer, twisted, appealing face. You felt that in him the new America had suddenly found itself and was all astir with the excitement of its first maturity.