imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run
along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so
that its passage seemed a flight from point to point of
brilliance. Wherever he focuses his survey a spot glows vividly.

The eye, the master sense of the mind, thus dominates him, and I
think that we shall trace to its mastery much of the immediate
power which he exerted by his writings and speeches on public,
social, and moral topics. He struck off, in the heat of
composition or of speaking, phrases and similes which millions
caught up eagerly and made as familiar as household words. He
even remembered from his extensive reading some item which, when
applied by him to the affair of the moment, acquired new
pertinence and a second life. Thus, Bunyan's " muckraker" lives
again; thus, "the curse of Meroz," and many another Bible
reference, springs up with a fresh meaning.

No doubt the purist will find occasional lapses in taste or
expression, and the quibbling peddler of rhetoric will gloat over
some doubtful construction; but neither purist nor peddler of
rhetoric has ever been able in his writing to display the ease,
the rush, the naturalness, the sparkle which were as genuine in
Roosevelt as were the features of his face. On reading these
pages, which have escaped the attention of the professional
critics, I wonder whether they may not have a fate similar to
Defoe's; for Defoe also was read voraciously by his
contemporaries, his pamphlets made a great rustle in their time,
and then the critics turned to other and spicier writers. But in
due season, other critics, as well as the world, made the
discovery that only a genius could have produced Defoe's