To-day, already, we know him for one of the rarest, freest, sweetest spirits that have ever come out of this land. We see the size of him plainly in the bitter moments in which we realize how vacant the scene has become since he quit it. There is so grey a death in the many fields to which he brought the light of his own clear nature! He was a humanist; and the men left us are sociologists, political thinkers, professors, and critics. We see the size of him, too, in happier moments; in some of those flashes in which, with a far surmise, we know what it is to be a free spirit; what it is to live for an idea, to "write in favor of that which the great interests of the world are against," to work toward "the enhancement of personal and artistic life and the creation of cultural values." For he was the artist-fighter in the drab American streets. It is certain, then, that his figure will stretch as the years go by, and become ever more generally visible. His fame and future are with the cycles of life.
For despite the mediocre world which would not heed him, he remained true to the spirit in him. He succeeded thoroughly in expressing to his time the far community of which he was a member. In his person, therefore, he has lent the world another image, another symbol and banner whereby the unborn thing which filled him, wherever and in whomsoever it grows, can come to greater consciousness, and therefore greater courage of itself, and be pressed onward toward birth. And, some day, the spring will come again to men.
