taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan
solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild
solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so
there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. It
is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It is
the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready
glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have
neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no
flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the
street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.




DECIVILIZED


The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparing
him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of
barbarism. Especially from new soil--remote, colonial--he faces you,
bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own
youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches and
canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and
to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He
is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless
slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The
new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does