that instantly revealed themselves as futile and fallacious, they also found their loyalties in perpetual conflict with one another. Inevitably their zeal waned and their energy ebbed away, and the tides of uniformity and commercialism swept the American scene once more. No one had grasped all these elements of the social situation so firmly as Bourne. He saw that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American mind to the currents of contemporary desire and effort and experiment abroad. And along each of these lines he did the work of a pioneer. Who, for example, had ever thought of exploring the soul of the younger generation as Bourne explored it? He had planned a long series of literary portraits of its types and personalities: half a dozen of them exist (along with several of quite a different character!--the keenest satires we have), enough to show us how sensitively he responded to those detached, groping, wistful, yet resolutely independent spirits whom he saw weaving the iridescent fabric of the future. He who had so early divined the truth of Maurice Barrès’ saying, that we never conquer the intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life, addressed himself exclusively to these young spirits: he went out to meet them, he probed their obscurities; one would have said that he was a sort of impresario gathering the personnel of some immense orchestra, seeking in each the principle of his own growth. He had studied his chosen minority with such instinctive care that everything he wrote came as a personal message to those, and those alone, who were capable of assimilating it; and that is why, as we look over his writings to-day, we find them a sort of corpus, a text full of secret ciphers, and packed with meaning between the lines, of all the most intimate questions and difficulties and turns of thought and feeling that make up the soul of young America. He revealed us to ourselves, he intensified and at the same time corroborated our desires; above all, he showed us what we had in common and what new increments of life might arise out of the friction of our differences. In these portraits he was already doing the work of the novelist he might well have become,--he left two or three chapters of a novel he had begun to write, in which “Karen” and “Sophronisba” and “The Professor” would probably have appeared, along with a whole battle-array of the older and younger generations; he was sketching out the rôle some novelist might play in the parturition of the new America. Everything for analysis, for self-discovery, for articulation, everything to put the younger generation in possession of itself! Everything to weave the tissue of a common understanding, to help the growth and freedom of the spirit! There was something prophetic in Bourne’s personality. In his presence one felt, in his writings one