speculation; and then going to the keyboard continue offering in a different medium, and through his broad palms and flexible wrists, the entertainment begun by his ratiocinations.
Towards the very close of his short hey-day, each of the many manifestations of life seemed to provide him with a subject for aristocratic pleasures. Not even his long depression over the war, or the doors which were slammed in his face because of his stand on American participation, or the cowardice of some of his radical collaborators, or other and more personal vexations, could dull the enjoyment. Life was a feast which began with breakfast and the latest broadsides of journalistic self-delivery. It was a feast which continued well into the night, so long as but a human being was near. Even while he went about carrying all the woes of all the friends being shipped off to army camps, and was being watched as a suspicious person because he and two ladies had taken a walking trip along the shore of Buzzard's Bay in the midst of a submarine scare, he could still laugh at the muckers of the New York Tribune with their "Who's Who in Traitors," no less than at the organs of liberal opinion with their "symposiums of eloquent idealism, their appealing harbingers of a cosmically efficacious and well-bred war." He had the rare gift of being able to pick up a newspaper or weekly and open it directly to the spot where the most naïve and absurd line of the issue was to be found. Breakfast was scarcely begun before Bourne had found at least one line to make the day go brightly. He even enjoyed himself, poor devil, as he lay a-choking to death and unable to inhale the oxygen conducted to his mouth. An eggnog was brought to him at his mumbled request; and as soon as he saw the saffron liquid, he began exclaiming with pleasure over its gorgeous hue. It was in keeping with his career that his last uttered syllables should register a delight of the eye.
From out this life, the broad flaunt of humanist colours in the crisis of war grew like fruit from roots and trunk and branch. In intercourse, in literature, Bourne had long been bearing witness to the glory of the life of wisdom. And still, so clarified was his vision of human values in the collapse of April, so male the power, so sure the means of expressing them, that sometimes the man of The Seven Arts essays seems a being apart from the author of Youth and Life, and Education and Living; even from parts of
