The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors this door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope. Is it a new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has led “to blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction writers, reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported regarding the success of their quest for happiness? If they have reported that certain sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence is there that other sorts lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,” says Arnold, “is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where delight will never really be found; then you illumine and further him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American paradise of nature; and finally, the hope of “A Paradise _within_ thee, happier far.” I If we consider the European background of the hope to escape to a paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the classical legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s _Castle of Indolence_, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational and non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously. Revolting from earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination, Akenside advocated refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph Warton glorified the “creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward Young sought to escape “this pestilential earth” by the “creative power” of the imagination to call forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy beings and unknown worlds,” in the “vast void beyond real existence.” He exalted a genius which was to “wander wild” in “the fairy land of fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras,” and “sport with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in _Vathek_ Beckford created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five palaces which he destined “for the particular gratification of each of the five senses.” “The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the youthful Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness” of actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest of this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us that only his “fearful and monstrous” story of _The Cenci_ is “a sad reality”; otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.” For him the Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate.” His is a longing indeterminate, a “devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.” “I loved I know not what--but this low sphere, And all that it contains, contains not thee.”