a certain flow of ideas. But Kipling was silent and overwhelmed in the presence of Roosevelt. Again I quote Mr. Thayer:
I have heard Mr. Rudyard Kipling tell how he used to drop in at the Cosmos Club at half past ten or so in the evening, and presently young Roosevelt would come and pour out projects, discussions of men and politics, criticisms of books, in a swift and full-volumed stream, tremendously emphatic and enlivened by bursts of humor. "I curled up on the seat opposite," said Kipling, "and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and. Theodore was the spinner."
Roosevelt quickened the pace of national life by his own mental and physical speed. His special contribution, however, was not the discovery but the direction of strenuousness. The captains of industry had been strenuous enough. He found a new object for physical and mental energy on the grand scale. More than any other man of his time he made political eminence a prize of the first order by his own unequivocal preference of public service and glory to private opulence and ease. The exigencies of his later political life associated him indeed with what a western humorist has described as the "high-low-brows;" he consorted with publicans and sinners; he broke bread with bosses and malefactors of great wealth; he played up the prize
