Cabell’s books being parts of a “Biography,” Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.” “His history was, in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I advanced for or against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.” _Jurgen_ may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the realisation of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful illusions and a cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought through an escape from this reality in dreaming of these illusions now shattered, or in dreaming of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is only a dirty little pot-bellied pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married to a shrewish, cowardly wife. Through magic, however, he is enabled to pack into one year “the follies of a quarter of a century,” to seek through a land of fabulous loveliness the phantom of desire. There he meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things perfect,” as he had loved her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in reality she was a “horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of flaming silk is the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there is the Queen Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is Anaitis, the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads; there is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in childhood; there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”; there is Florimel who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis, Satan’s wife, “the loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and all Jurgen tires. His remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen eyes” force him “to jeer out of season” to avoid “far more untimely tears” reminds us of the Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with infinite sadness: “If I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, ’Tis that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy.” And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility and hopelessness of his aimless longing: “Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no longer discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear that I am already dead.” It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of despair of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this idyllic hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as “despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight” “Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” And Shelley of the iridescent dreams, who would