The liberty of his mind, his lucidity, his keen penetration, render him incapable of accepting the least dogma or the least constraint. It is impossible to conceive of anything that could have upon such a mind, not to say a direct hold, but even an appreciable influence. That mind is alone, magnificently alone, as independent as if the world were just born. Moreover, he is quite as far from all revealed religions as from all systems. He would in no wise admit that the Christian or any other religion is more closely related to the past, and Darwinism or any scientism whatever more to the future. He would see, in these diverse ways of viewing life, forms of the human mind which return at periodic intervals and of which one no more than the other is an absolute progress in which he does not believe. Only by his very nature, he is antimaterialistic. He believes in the duality of soul and body in an absolute, organic manner. He hopes sincerely to quit this body and go to live a larger and fuller life. No personal immortality! He cannot endure the thought. That would be the continuation of this captivity in a limited personality, which to him appears stifling. He feels that he is also going to live in God, not understanding by that word any anthropomorphic god, but a fountain of universal life. He loves to plunge, through time and space, into a meditation in which he totally forgets his personality, and wherein he finds a sort of intoxication. He has uttered this admirable and terrible sentence: “Sometimes I feel _no difference_ between my friends absent or present, living or dead.” To ask such a being if he is of the past or of the future would have no significance; he is beyond the compass of time. I have met Rolland only through letters. But some words concerning his personality, as it had affected another poet, I can communicate here in conclusion: “The confident grasp replete with experience, the modest ripeness ... in his being; the benignity, the unprecedented purity in all his purpose ... are beneficent.... Everything is genuine, developed with will and consciousness: a man who has improved steadily.... From him emanates a gentle plenitude, consummate in action, like that of a star at twilight.” When world renown comes to such a man, it has not much to say to him. Rolland meets it with an averted glance in his far-seeing luminous eyes, eyes which quietly and steadily look towards new works and new horizons.