_Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_ are matchless records of his fruitless quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Palace of Art_ testify to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised himself in _A Nympholept_, while his friend, the author of _The Earthly Paradise_, strove to “build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.” With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In _The Author’s Account of Himself_, Irving, our first master of the short story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and the legend-haunted Alhambra. _The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel_, dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect” on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings of a fair princess--“no flower of the field could compare with her for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.” Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. In “a remote period of American history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,” Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced by lines from _The Castle of Indolence_, _The Legend_ illustrates Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s _History of New England Witchcraft_,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and Poe.