riot in his blood and a sweetness under the tongue as they were to Mark Twain when he first came out of the West.
Another of Sherwood Anderson's gifts.—Now, I must apologize, I suppose, for calling this a gift. He possesses what some of the younger critics devoutly hoped had gone out: he possesses "high seriousness." He has made no secret of it. From his first book to his latest he has appeared as a passionate seeker for the meaning and purpose, the inmost meaning and purpose, in this driving, noisy, smoky, ugly, hungry, monotonous, wearying civilization in which we welter.
Finally, Sherwood Anderson is or has been a mystic—I think a genuine mystic; and time after time he has been in moments of almost ecstatic "awareness," when through the arid channel of existence meaning swept like a spring freshet and all the dusty cobwebbed windows of the house of life were filled with colored flame, like a sordid tenement transfigured by some casual felicity of the sunset.
I know perfectly well that I cannot expect modern readers to follow me when I say that my interest in this ex-advertising man from Chicago and my understanding of him are due in considerable measure to my youthful addiction to a queer book by a mediæval Italian—a fierce, quarrelsome, disreputable, probably sensual and certainly vagabond fellow who wrote a book about the Beatific Vision and another, Vita Nuova, in which he describes, among other visions, this:
