concerns us most is that of the year spent in his journey round a
considerable part of the world in 1913-14, testifying with a charm that
increases as he goes to that quest of unprejudiced culture, the true
poetic, the vision of the life of man, which was to prove the liveliest
of his impulses. It was not indeed under the flag of that research that
he offered himself for the Army almost immediately after his return to
England--and even if when a young man was so essentially a poet we need
see no act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune of this set
of letters from New York and Boston, from Canada and Samoa, addressed,
for the most part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, in the
fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; for we make him out as
steadily more vivid and delightful while his opportunity grows. He is
touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure of his good
faith; we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New
York pandemonium--obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and the
overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged
advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and
manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights--eyes
of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the
vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We
feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would fain turn it on to the
capture of deeper meanings. But we must leave him to himself and to
youth's facility of wonder; he is amused, beguiled, struck on the whole
with as many differences as we could expect, and sufficiently reminded,
no doubt, of the number of words he is restricted to. It is moreover his
sign, as it is that of the poetic turn of mind in general that we seem
to catch him alike in anticipations or divinations, and in lapses and
freshnesses, of experience that surprise us. He makes various
reflections, some of them all perceptive and ingenious--as about the
faces, the men's in particular, seen in the streets, the public