with God”; in the bygone glories of the Spanish adventurers; in reliving in revery his youth, “the realest of his lives”; in the loving study of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; and in his interest in his former student’s worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers. The seemingly irrelevant interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his inability to interest official Washington, “so petty, so slavish,” in his “religious emotion” regarding his discovery of the relics of the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its paralleling and under-scoring the Professor’s own struggle--the romantic spirit struggling in vain against materialism and convention. Finally, when the Professor’s family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a storm blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself?” He cannot bear the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of their way of life. Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that “he had let something go--and it was gone: something very precious.” He reflects that “his apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied with their own affairs.” No, the merely romantic devotion to what is picturesque in the storied past will never avail in the quest for peace in a conventional and materialistic environment. Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the Hergesheimer novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled.” For example, in _Linda Condon_, based on this theme, Peyton, a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda, who marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he dies in forlorn desolation. “Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.”