I recall it in Quintillian. I recall it in Tertullian. And occasionally, but rarer, in Latin historians. It was in Catullus. And Virgil, the _Eclogues_, _Georgics_. It was something in solution in the world of that day, _honey from the heart of man_. Horace was too modern. Art was becoming fashionable, facile. He wrote with eye to what people would think, later say. But Virgil kept the seasoned sweetness of the past. In writers of modern Spain I have seen it. In Galdós, the _Episodios Nacionales_, and its springing up again in the Spanish tongue, in South America. In Italy, Italy of the great ages, it has been rich; d’Annunzio has been too proud perhaps to suffer, to learn with the patient anguish of the soul. It has flowered best in France, the wild thyme, which goes to the making of honey. Consider Maurice de Guerin. Recall lines of Verlaine, Heredia! The great Balzac, Bazin, Bertrand, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Flaubert the Magnificent, letters of peasant Millet, the diary of Fromentin in Africa, Huysman, Mallarmé, and the Little Grandson of the Great Renan, Ernest Psichari, in the book about Africa, _The Centurion_. I recall an occasional line Rimbaud wrote before he was twenty, which gleams in my mind today like cut steel; hard, perfect, indestructible, cruel. The great poetry of France is prose, which is the world’s best. When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there was another, a different England from that of today. As examples Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings, Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm, the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished, she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested _modernism_, which does not become her, are working their will. The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it. I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best is doing the impossible.