SOURCE: "James Huneker," in Sketches in Criticism, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932, pp. 230-35.

An American critic and biographer, Brooks is noted chiefly for his studies of such writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for his influential commentary on the history of American literature. In the following essay, Brooks remembers Huneker as a prototypical American writer attracted to European culture.

Do you remember the roses in the Luxembourg Gardens, those roses, at once so opulent and so perfect, that blossom against the grey stone of the old balustrades? But one does not forget them: it is as if in some unique fashion they fulfilled the destiny of all the roses. What one perhaps does forget is the sacrifice they represent. Who can estimate the care lavished upon the organisms that bear those blossoms, which are indeed the fruit of a ruthless and incessant...