Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| then wake up with a guilty start to confess that his whole hour was gone and hurry away while they shouted after him. It was the student in him which we in our day are so apt. to forget in the man of action, of deeds. But the two have always gone together in him; they belong together. In all the wild excitement of the closing hours of the convention that set him in the Vice-President’s chair he, alone in an inner room, was reading Thucydides, says Albert Shaw, who was with him. He was resting. I saw him pick up a book, in a lull in the talk, the other day, and instantly forget all things else. He was not reading the book as much as he was living it. So, men get all there is out of what is in hand, and they are few who can do it. However, of that I shall have more to say later, when I have him in Mulberry Street, where he was mine for two years. |
| His college chums, sometimes, seeing the surface drift and judging from it, thought him “quite unrestrained,” as one of them put it to me, meaning that he lacked a strong grip on himself. It was a natural mistake. They saw the enthusiasm that gave seemingly full vent to itself and tested men by the contact, not |