ey were more like a mosaic of variegated and richly colored
stones and jewels. I felt always as though I were in the presence of a
great personage, not one who was reserved or pompous but a loose
bubbling temperament, wise beyond his years or day, and so truly great
that perhaps because of the intensity and immense variety of his
interests he would never shine in a world in which the most intensive
specialization, and that of a purely commercial character, was the grand
role.

And yet I always felt that perhaps he might. He attracted people of all
grades so easily and warmly. His mind leaped from one interest to
another almost too swiftly, and yet the average man understood and liked
him. While in a way he contemned their mental states as limited or
bigoted, he enjoyed the conditions under which they lived, seemed to
wish to immerse himself in them. And yet nearly all his thoughts were,
from their point of view perhaps, dangerous. Among his friends he was
always talking freely, honestly, of things which the average man could
not or would not discuss, dismissing as trash illusion, lies or the
cunning work of self-seeking propagandists, most of the things currently
accepted as true.

He was constantly commenting on the amazing dullness of man, his
prejudices, the astonishing manner in which he seized upon and clung
savagely or pathetically to the most ridiculous interpretations of life.
He was also forever noting that crass chance which wrecks so many of our
dreams and lives,--its fierce brutalities, its seemingly inane
indifference to wondrous things,--but never in a depressed or morbid
spirit; merely as a matter of the curious, as it were. But if any one
chanced to contradict him he was likely to prove liquid fire. At the
same time he was forever reading, reading, reading--history, archaeology,
ethnology, geology, travel, medicine, biography, and descanting on the
wonders and idiosyncrasies of man and nature which they revealed. He was
never tired of talking of the intellectual and social conditions that
ruled in Greece and Rome from 600 B.C. on, the philosophies, the
travels, the art, the simple, natural pagan view of things, and
regretting that they were no more. He grieved at times, I think, that he
had not been of that world, might not have seen it, or, failing that,
might not see all the shards of those extinct civilizations. There was
something loving and sad in the manner in which at times, in one museum
and an