There has been a steadily cumulative interest in the Nobel prizes, during the last twenty-five years. Proof is found by comparing journals of 1901 and 1925, with reference to data and discussion of prize winners of the respective years. That the will of Alfred Nobel was an epochal document, in the history of science and literature, was a slowly recognized truth. What is idealism in literature? What writers will be candidates with books “of idealistic tendency”? How important will be the influence of such awards? Such were queries in many minds. The meaning of idealism is elastic in interpretation, as examples among the winners will testify. A general principle holds, however, in past and present standards--the idealistic writer sees _beyond_ nature and externals; he sees “with the eye of the spirit.” The difference has been expressed in fitting analogy, by contrast between a photograph and a portrait of the same individual--if the latter is painted by an intuitive artist, with vision and insight, as well as artistic technic. René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme, the first author to win the prize in literature, in 1901, received adulatory comments from French journals and several pages of _personalia_ and criticism in literary magazines of England, Germany, Scandinavia, and America. For more than forty years he had been recognized as one of the greatest living poets, the philosophical poet of the nineteenth century in France, about whose life and work there was inadequate information in English translations; the inadequacy is still apparent. The French Academy was happy that one of its members should have been chosen for this honor, the first on the list of international candidates. Born in Paris, May 16, 1839, this French poet evidently belonged to the nineteenth century, in its middle and later decades, rather than to the twentieth century and its productive or prophetic writers. In the poetry of Sully-Prudhomme are found, almost always, two elements sometimes in conflict, wistful tenderness and serious, challenging reflection. This combination of traits may be explained, in part, by the circumstances of his inheritance and childhood. For ten years his mother had waited to marry her lover, the father of the poet; four years after their marriage, he died. Devoted to her son and believing that he had marked skill in science, she gave him every possible chance for education; but his home life was lacking in gayety or lighter interests. At the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, René Sully-Prudhomme excelled in mathematical sciences and his future seemed assured as a scholar and teacher. Then an illness affected his eyes so seriously that he had to abandon concentrated study and he began to write poems of philosophic trend, questioning the meaning of life yet vibrating with emotion.