No other
American compares with him, and I know of no other, in English at
least, who has made a contribution in these fields equal to his.
Throughout these eight or ten volumes he proves himself to be one
of those rare writers who see what they write. As in the case of
Tennyson, than whom no English poet, in spite of nearsightedness,
has observed so minutely the tiniest details of form or the
faintest nuance of color, so the lack of normal vision did not
prevent Roosevelt from being the closest of observers. He was
also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read
one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself
wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it
is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He
does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by
heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His
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.
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