and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become so immingled and so fused together that we can’t tell which is which, any more.” Just as the Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,” its illusions, triumphant over its “material life,” its stark reality, so with the brutal news that the “town had to bury” the deceitful relative, the poverty-stricken book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two years, in mental night, always brooding, steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams”--like the modern realists! What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a material paradise? In _The Mysterious Stranger_ (1916) he recorded his final despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a “wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare of the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope for. After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor--death.” His _What Is Man?_ and _To a Person Sitting in Darkness_ express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To him man became “a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!” Although Hamlin Garland came to believe that “truth was a higher quality than beauty” and set himself down as “an unflinching realist,” one must recall that he comes of a race of “potential poets, bards, and dreamers,” that he traces in general the disillusionment resulting from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic quest for an American paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of poetry,” the illusion, through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality, “the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity.” “When we’ve wood and prairie land, Won by our toil, We’ll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil!” Here is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to prairie-land. Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and scenes of my boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its strange dominion,” he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light that never was, on sea or land,” Garland’s illusion “has all the quality of a vision, something experienced in another world,” covered with “a poetic glamour.”