And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose, the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he reads Rousseau’s _Confessions_. One night they stay in the woods, watching the stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn.” In “the innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen” of Atlantis, and he her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to despair.” And then there was Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher, Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and finally Joyce, with whom he spent the nights in the cabin. He explains to Joyce that he seeks “something better than just ordinary, everyday happiness,” that he doesn’t believe in private property, God, the home, or the support of one’s wife. He wants a companionship “at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally he felt “a discrepancy between her and a not very distinct ideal of his imagination.” He “clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in preference to the “world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce tells him she is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of his dreams fell shattering about him.” Obviously, _Moon-Calf_ is the creation of the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.” Let us turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for æsthetic or emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment of either the frontier or an industrial society. In _O Pioneers!_ most piteous is the fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the arms of her lover. In _The Song of the Lark_ Thea Kronsburg develops her rare voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only one big thing--desire.” In _My Ántonia_ the heroine says, “That is happiness--to be dissolved in something complete and great.” Her lust for richness of experience leads to her becoming an unmarried mother and finally the mother of a large family. In _Youth and the Bright Medusa_ a typical story is that of Paul, whose longing for an æsthetic paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him to robbery and to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most instructive, perhaps, is _The Professor’s House_, based on the fruitless struggle of the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The Professor does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”; he resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly wife and daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his daughters over fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself away from everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however, he seeks to substitute not a central interest in what is most richly and typically human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the pomp of the Middle Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama