present.

The Puritan rulers of America are very anxious to "educate"
foreigners in the free "institutions" of their new home. One can only
pray that the persons submitted to this process will find some
opportunity of adding to their "education" some cursory
acquaintance with their own classics; so that when the hour arrives
and we wake to find ourselves under the rule of trade-unions or
socialistic bureaucrats, our new authorities will know at least
something of the "institution," as Walt Whitman somewhere calls it,
of intellectual toleration.

Remy de Gourmont himself is very far from being a socialist. He
has imbibed with certain important differences, due to his
incorrigible Latin temperament, many of the doctrines of Nietzsche;
but Nietzsche himself could hardly be more inimical to any kind of
mob-rule than this exponent of "subjective idealism."

Remy de Gourmont does not interest himself greatly in political
changes. He does not interest himself in political revolutions. Like
Goethe, he considers the intellectual freedom of the artist and
philosopher best secured under a government that is stable and
lasting; better still under a government that confines itself rigidly to
its own sphere and leaves manners and morals to the taste of the
individual; best of all under that Utopian absence of any government,
whether of the many or of the few, whereof all free spirits dream.

Remy de Gourmont has written one immortal philosophical romance
in "A Night in the Luxembourg." He has written some exquisite
poetry full of a voluptuous and ironic charm; full of that remoteness
from sordid reality which befits a lonely and epicurean spirit, a spirit
pursuing its own way on the shadowy side of all human roads where
the old men dream their most interesting dreams and the young
maidens dance their most unreserved dances.

He has written many graceful and lovely prose poems--one hesitates
to call them "short stories"--in which the reader is transported away
beyond all modern surroundings into that delicate dream world so
dear to lovers of Watteau and Poussin, where the nymphs of Arcadia
gather, wondering and wistful, about the feet of wandering saints,
and where the symbols of Dionysian orgies blend with the symbols
of the redemption of humanity.

He has written admirable and unsurpassed criticism upon almost all
the contemporary figures of French literature--criticism which in
many cases contains a wisdom and a delicacy o