conveyances and elsewhere; though falling a little short, in his
friendly wondering way, of that bewildered apprehension of monotony of
type, of modelling lost in the desert, which we might have expected of
him, and of the question above all of what is destined to become of that
more and more vanishing quantity the American nose other than Judaic.

What we note in particular is that he likes, to all appearance, many
more things than he doesn't, and how superlatively he is struck with the
promptitude and wholeness of the American welcome and of all its
friendly service. What it is but too easy, with the pleasure of having
known him, to read into all this is the operation of his own
irresistible quality, and of the state of felicity he clearly created
just by appearing as a party to the social relation. He moves and
circulates to our vision as so naturally, so beautifully undesigning a
weaver of that spell, that we feel comparatively little of the story
told even by his diverted report of it; so much fuller a report would
surely proceed, could we appeal to their memory, their sense of poetry,
from those into whose ken he floated. It is impossible not to figure
him, to the last felicity, as he comes and goes, presenting himself
always with a singular effect both of suddenness and of the readiest
rightness; we should always have liked to be there, wherever it was, for
the justification of our own fond confidence and the pleasure of seeing
it unfailingly spread and spread. The ironies and paradoxes of his
verse, in all this record, fall away from him; he takes to direct
observation and accepts with perfect good-humour any hazards of contact,
some of the shocks of encounter proving more muffled for him than might,
as I say, have been feared--witness the American Jew with whom he
appears to have spent some hours in Canada; and of course the "word" of
the whole thing is that he simply reaped at every turn the harmonising
benefit that his presence conferred. This it is in especial that makes