Randolph had reached what we crudely call a “mid-life crisis,” as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn—gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism—but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and
...more
