But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr. James’s education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a thoughtful observer of men and things.  He has seen more cities and manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.  We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of the world.  On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.  He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening the ardor of his fancy.  He is thus excellently fitted for the line he has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry.  Mr. James does not see things with his eyes alone.  His vision is always modified by his imaginative temperament.  He is the last man we should consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual pilgrimage.  We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. Et ego in Arcadia, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the name we found in our guide-book.  It is always Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the giddier sister)—­it is always fact seen through imagination and transfigured by it.  A single example will best show what we mean.  “It is partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands.”  Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James’s pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a “disembodied voice,” or says of an English country-church that “it made a Sunday where it stood.”  A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.  But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased.  Mr. James tempts us into many byways of serious and fruitful thought.  Especially valuable and helpful have we found his obiter dicta on the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says