and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumn
afternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!

There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptions
of town and country churches in conventional England which would
suggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages.
Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinent
questions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcluding
shrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety.

I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see him
prostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placid
and still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco,"
listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whose
goodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while the
mellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hair
of Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quiet
thoughts in front of him.

It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance of
this great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; what
weight of massive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head of
Henry James and the head of Oscar Wilde--both of them with
something that suggests the classical ages in their flesh-heavy
contours--one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare's Caesar in his
suspicion of "lean men."

Think of the harassed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all the
younger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as these
of James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one not
discern the envious eye, the serpent's tongue, the scowl of the
aggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?

How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the
"equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises of
our human arena, it is something to encounter an author who
preserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more to
encounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancient
virtue of magnanimity.

This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "good
manners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and the
more we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully we
become aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm,
this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and noble heart.

The movement of literature at the present time is all towards