reflecting the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked soil of this land--courage, and self-abnegation, and love, and faith--this last not faith in some abstract goodness, but faith which God Himself founded and still rules. France has turned to her ancient faith with more passionate devotion than she has shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning the same lesson from war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism and pessimism and materialism and the lust for novelty which has hampered our national development. I hope that our poets already see this tendency and rejoice in it--if they do not they are unworthy of their craft. “Just what effect the war would have had on Kilmer had he been spared is of course an entirely elusive topic,” has said one very able and on the whole most valuable commentator, speaking from the testimony then in hand, and voicing, I fancy, an idea still rather general. It is not now, I think, an elusive topic at all, but a matter as plain as a pikestaff. And the matter is, by the way, the second of the two most indispensable pages in Kilmer’s story. It is a page in which his character underwent another metamorphosis as consequential in its effect on his talent even, if that could be possible, as his conversion to the Catholic faith. Kilmer left the United States a professional writer from his twenty-third year, and one of the most accomplished, prolific and industrious journalists of his day. Writing with him had become a habit almost as natural as speech. It was his intention when he left New York to write a war book. He discussed this project with his publishers even so definitely as to have settled upon a title: “Here and There With the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” As time passed it became puzzling why no “copy” of any kind came from him. And as still more time passed this matter assumed for me an element of more than considerable mystery. It was incomprehensible because none of the reasons which would ordinarily apply in such a situation explained Kilmer’s case to me. If it had been anyone else I should have concluded that he was unable to find time to write anything. But precisely the point about Kilmer was that he did the impossible: it was quite his habit to, in the racy phrase, “get away with” situations which would have floored anyone else. It was to my mind an illogical hypothesis that he could be frustrated by obstacles. And I felt that, inexplicable as it was for Kilmer to fail in anything or to neglect any opportunity, he was here failing in justice to his career. How was it in fact? As it had always been. He was receiving the light opened to him. There could not be, I submit, any more telling proof that he had genius, the capacity to become an absolutely great writer, than this: that in this war which has prompted more people to write, and has produced more “copy” than nearly all the other events of history put together, he ceased altogether to be a