mmunicated to the
student a warm sense of its significance. Leaders of great
movements who have been successful in controlling the energies
and loyalties of millions of men have been frequently
men of this high and contagious voltage. It certainly
constituted part of Theodore Roosevelt's political strength, and, in
more or less genuine form, is the asset of every successful
political speaker and leader.

Both for the one controlled by enthusiasm and for the
others to whom it spreads, experience becomes richer in
significance. Poets and the poetically-minded have to a singular
degree the power of clothing with imaginative enthusiasm
all the items of their experience.

Enthusiasm does not necessarily connote hysteria or sentimentalism.
The unstable enthusiast is a familiar type, the
man who has another object of eagerness and loyalty each
week. Mark Twain describes the type in the person of his
brother, who had a dozen different ambitions a year. But
enthusiasm may be a long-sustained devotion to a single ideal.
A curious instance of it was seen in the case of an Armenian
scholar who, so it is reported to the writer by a student of
Armenian culture, spent forty years in mastering cuneiform
script in order to prove that the Phrygians were descended
from the Armenians, and not _vice versa_.

Shelley could kindle the spirit of revolution in thousands
who would have been bored to death with the same fiery doctrines
in the abstract and cold pages of Godwin, from whom
Shelley derived his ideas of "political justice." The enthusiast,
since he instinctively likes to share his emotions, not
infrequently displays an intense desire for leadership, not so
much that he may be a leader as that he may win converts to
his own cause or creed. Such a personality finds its satisfaction
in some form of proselyting zeal, be it for a religion, for
a favorite charity, for good books, poetry, or social justice.
A well-known literary scholar who died recently was thus
described by one of his former students:

Dr. Gummere was not a teacher; he was a vital atmosphere and
his lectures, as one considered them from an intellectual or
emotional angle, were revelations or adventures. There never were
such classes as his, we believed. Who could equal him in readiness
of wit? Where was there such a raconteur? Who else could put the
feel of a poem into one's heart? ... His voice was very deep, and
exceedingly free and flexible. It always seemed to