We will stop a moment at this most loosely motivated journey and take a closer look at the personality, as well as the activities of our hero. He seems to us still incomprehensible and foolish; we have no idea of how his special folly is to acquire enough human appeal to compel our interest. It is the privilege of the author of _Gradiva_ to leave us in such a quandary; with his beauty of diction and his judicious selection of incident, he presently rewards our confidence and the undeserved sympathy which we still grant to his hero. Of the latter we learn that he is already destined by family tradition to be an antiquarian, has later, in isolation and independence, submerged himself completely in his science, and has withdrawn entirely from life and its pleasures. Marble and bronze are, for his feelings, the only things really alive and expressing the purpose and value of human life. Yet, perhaps with kind intent, Nature has put into his blood a thoroughly unscientific sort of corrective, a most lively imagination, which can impress itself not only on his dreams, but also on his waking life. By such separation of imagination and intellectual capacity, he is destined to be a poet or a neurotic, and he belongs to that race of beings whose realm is not of this world. So it happens that his interest is fixed upon a bas-relief which represents a girl walking in an unusual manner, that he spins a web of fancies about it, invents a name and an ancestry for it, and transports the person created by him into Pompeii, which was buried more than eighteen hundred years ago. Finally, after a remarkable anxiety-dream he intensifies the fancy of the existence and destruction of the girl named Gradiva into a delusion which comes to influence his acts. These performances of imagination would appear to us strange and inscrutable, if we should encounter them in a really living person. As our hero, Norbert Hanold, is a creature of an author, we should like to ask the latter timidly if his fancy has been determined by any power other than his own arbitrariness.