Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for quoting further, in illustration of the reluctance, caution and restraint that may check the exuberance of personal feeling, from a statement made by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in January, 1904: He said: "In John Hay I have a great Secretary of State. In Philander Knox I have a great Attorney-General. In other Cabinet posts I have great men. Elihu Root could take any of these places and fill it as well as the man who is now there. And, in addition, he is what probably none of these gentlemen could be, a great Secretary of War. Elihu Root is the ablest man I have known in our Government service. I will go further. He is the greatest man that has appeared in the public life of any country, in any position, on either side of the ocean, in my time." Criticism offers no adequately descriptive word for this type of reserved, unventurous statement. Let us consider whether it may not properly be styled the imperial theodoric. Now, in conclusion,—if such disjecta membra as these may have a conclusion— we have only skirted the nearer coasts; what you have heard has been the merest memorandum of a somewhat haphazard voyage. No hour's excursion can carry us far in our quest of the secret of style. If the wide sea of literature could be charted, then we all might find the ports into which the master mariners have sailed their crafts; but we labor with a broken oar and our log book is a tame record of vain attempts to land on impossible shores. We see many great ships hull down on the horizon, but dare not follow them far;—the majestic caravel of George Meredith bearing ingots of pure gold, as rough and clean as Browning lyrics; and close beside it the stately craft of George Eliot,—would that there were time to go aboard and wrest their secrets from them! And I must not omittha...