in literature on the letters he wrote to his children, helpful yet full of the tenderest feeling. Even in his hastiest notes, dashed off or dictated in thin intervals between pressing decisions, he disclosed his command over the vocabulary of our stubborn tongue; he rarely failed to find at once the necessary noun and the illuminating adjective. In his ampler books he painted characters with a bold brush and an assured stroke; and in his letters he etched with a swift needle portraits as life-like.

Now and again in the leisure he made for himself by a wise and rigid economy of time, he relaxed from more arduous labors by writing essays and literary criticisms. His essays, all too few, are pungent with his personality; and his literary criticisms reveal his possession of the four qualities which we have a right to demand in those who judge books and authors-in

sight, equipment, sympathy, and disinterestedness. He loved books all his life long; he was an omnivorous reader, and, what is quite as significant, a persistent re-reader. He knew the masterpieces of literature and he appreciated them for the value they have for us now. He searched the annals of many peoples; and he also sought out the primitive tradition, the half-forgotten folk-lore, which is often a clue to racial characteristics. He preferred the literature which was closest to life; he joyed in the struggle of strong men; and he had likings akin to those of the little boy whose mother offered to read to him out of the Bible and who begged her to pick out "the fightingest parts."

At the same time he could deal lovingly with the unassertive poems which present the uneventful aspects of life and which mirror for us the placidity of the backwaters of exist

ence. He had a delicate perception of literary merit; and he was never taken captive by the labored paragraphs of those who think they can live by style alone and who inlay verbal mosaics to deck precious coffers,-empty more often than not. His own style is firm and succulent.

He had sat at the feet of the masters of English; and he had profited by the lesson to be learned from the French and the Greeks. He wrote well because he had absorbed good literature for the sheer delight he took in it; and this had nourished his vocabulary with strong words which he could bend to his bidding. But he was not bookish in his diction; and we never catch him questing recondite vocables. He never indulged in "fine writing," so-called, often only the written equivalent of "tall-talk." His style was masculine and vascular; and he was not afraid of vernacular directness. At his best he achieved the ideal

-the speech of the people in the mouth of the scholar.

It is by the interpreting imagination, by the vision and the faculty divine, that an occasional address like Lincoln's at Gettysburg, or a casual magazine article, like Theodore Roosevelt's Great Adventure, transcends its immediate and temporary purpose and is lifted up to the serener heights of pure literature. There is a poetic elevation and a noble dignity in the opening paragraph of the Great Adventure which testify to its kinship with Lincoln's address, and there is a severe concision also, recalling the stately terseness of the Greek inscriptions.

Perhaps this tribute, brief and inadequate, may best be brought to an end by the quotation of this passage:

Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts

of the same Great Adventure. Never yet was worthy adventure worthily carried through by the man who put his personal safety first. Never yet was a country worth living in unless its sons and daughters were of that stern stuff which bade them die for it at need; and never yet was a country worth dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life not as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual, but as a link in the great chain of creation and causation, so that each person is seen in his true relation as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve the larger and continuing life of the whole.

By his own life, by what he did, by what he said, and by what he wrote, Theodore Roosevelt proved that he was fit to live and that he was fit to die.