He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering variety. A composite is Loti--almost a chameleon, not only entering into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn, but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of this somewhat more in due order. Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or frankly named in _propria persona_. So while we are at no time at a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is both embarrassingly rich and--contradictory. Still, no one can mistake the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct. Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He moved in the upper layers of feeling--feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for woman--and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover. His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found him fresh, tender, elemental--and as sincere as the temporary lover can be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed sea he felt a vast concern. Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little; at last his faith was doubt. Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms. Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit--these excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he painted with supernal beauty. In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into accepting his pictures as ever new. In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will you find aught to excel this passage from _Mon frère Yves_?