"Anything so white I never before beheld on this dirty earth, except in my dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwell peace and purity. I greet thee, white house.... Now, I am at home." It is as if the heat of imagination, which produced some of Strindberg's great books, were too great to permit him to leave a subject, when, artistically, it is finished. After _Inferno_ he wrote Legends which was but a faint echo. The theme of _To Damascus_ is weakly repeated in _The Great Highway_, a drama in verse and prose which also deals with the soul's fearful struggle and disillusionment. _To Damascus_ contains some shallow thoughts and some banalities of expression, but it is a powerful creation, magnificently conceived. In _The Great Highway_ the mysticism falls flat, the play does not grip by any poetic power; it is an _olla podrida_ of its author's philosophy of life which sometimes is not even lukewarm. But it does contain some gems of lyrical beauty, and one or two passages in which Strindberg reaches his own heights. The _Dream Play_ is a new conception and a new art. In a memorandum to the play Strindberg writes: "In this Dream Play, as in the previous one _To Damascus_, the author has sought to imitate the disconnected, but apparently logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist;, on an insignificant background of reality imagination spins threads and weaves new patterns: a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, solidify, diffuse, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all--that of the dreamer; it knows no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no law." The texture of _To Damascus_ is solid compared with that of _The Dream Play_. The story of the descent of the Daughter of Indra into matter, of human life as typified by The Glazier, The Officer, The Lawyer, The Bill-poster and The Poet, is told without any dramatic sequence, such as is required by the theatre of to-day. It is a play written for a stage not yet built, to be performed by some diaphanous visitants from the astral world. Strindberg calls _The Dream Play_ a Buddhistic and proto-Christian drama. It is more than that: it is pre-cosmic.