skim the collection of his official messages, as Commissioner, as
Governor, or as President, and you will discover that he had the
gift of infusing life and color into the usually drab and
cheerless wastes of official documents.

I am not concerned to make a literary appraisal of Theodore
Roosevelt's manifold works, but I am struck by the fact that our
professional critics ignore him entirely in their summaries or
histories of recent American literature. As I re-read, after
twenty years, and in some cases after thirty years, books of his
which made a stir on their appearance, I am impressed, not only
by the excellence of their writing, but by their lasting quality.
If he had not done so many other things of greater importance,
and done them supremely, he would have secured lasting fame by
his books on hunting, ranching, and exploration. No other
American compares with him, and I know of no other, in English at
least, who has made a contribution in these fields equal to his.

Throughout these eight or ten volumes he proves himself to be one
of those rare writers who see what they write. As in the case of
Tennyson, than whom no English poet, in spite of nearsightedness,
has observed so minutely the tiniest details of form or the
faintest nuance of color, so the lack of normal vision did not
prevent Roosevelt from being the closest of observers. He was
also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read
one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself
wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it
is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He
does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by
heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His