However, if the Son of the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow which did not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully a phantom of hope, he is honest enough to record the results of such a quest. As he grew up he noted a “growing bitterness”--“disillusionment had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of hope faded into the light of common day. What had been the “marvel of a golden earth before a crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic.” “What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental grace?... At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest....” It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious generalised study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator, meeting his father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom: “He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.” “All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.” Garland, then, has given us a cross-section of our national history; he has faithfully recorded the “almost universal” despair which greets men who would “reign like kings in fairyland.” Rolvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold. Per Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight toward the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper into a bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.” Finally they halt and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the “eternal, unbroken wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets in; Beret has a child. Here again we meet the two planes of frontier consciousness--idyllic hope built on illusion and the dread of a sordid and terrifying reality.