a man who had visions of things.  Without the time to separate his visions into the language of pure classicism—­a feat which Tennyson superlatively contrived to accomplish—­he yet took out the right details, and by skilful combination built you, in the briefest possible space, a strongly vivid picture.  If you look straight out at any scene, you will see what all men see when they look straight out; but when you inquire curiously into all the quarters of the compass, you will see what no man ever saw when he simply looked out of his two eyes without regarding the here, there, and everywhere.  When Tennyson wrote of

          “flush’d Ganymede, his rosy thigh
      Half-buried in the Eagle’s down,
    Sole as a flying star shot thro’ the sky
        Above the pillar’d town”—­

you felt the wonder of the picture.  Applied in a vastly different way, put to vastly different uses, the visual gift of Steevens belonged to the same order of things.  Consider this passage from his Soudan book:—­

“Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces, donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins grilled to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf—­don’t look at it.”

The writer, swinging on at the obvious pace with which this writing swings, of course has no chance to make as flawless a picture as the great man of leisure; but the pictorial quality of each is precisely the same.  Both understood the fine art of selection.

I have sometimes wondered if I grudged to journalism what Steevens stole from letters.  I have not yet quite come to a decision; for, had he never left the groves of the academic for the crowded career of the man of the world, we should never have known his amazing versatility, or even a fraction of his noble character as it was published to the world.  Certainly the book to which this chapter forms a mere pendant must, in parts, stand as a new revelation no less of the nobility of that character than of his extraordinary foresight, his wonderful instinct for the objectiveness of life.  I believe that in his earliest childhood his feeling for the prose of geography was like Wordsworth’s cataract—­it “haunted him like a passion.”  And all the while the subjective side of life called for the intrusion of his prying eyes.  So that you may say it was more or less pure chance that led him to give what has proved to be the bulk of his active years to the objective side of things, the purely actual.  Take, in this very book, that which amounts practically to a prophecy of the difficulty of capturing a point like Spion Kop, in the passage where he describes how impossible it is to judge of the value of a hill-top until you get there. (Pope, by the way—­and I state the point not from