Since the earliest stages of development of the spiritual life there have existed, side by side with men of observation and action, thinkers and dreamers who turn away from actualities, and build up around them a world of ideas which their excessively developed power of imagination could fashion, and endow with romantic life according to their own inclination and necessities. Thus arose all symbols, mythologies, fables, and superstitions that were enshrined in folk-lore, traditions, and, more especially, in all arts. Civilisation brings with it, by this means, besides its recognition of nature, a world of shadows invented by men freely—even if according to fixed psychological laws—like a ghostly double, the astral body of the real world; and our prescriptive education, which comprises in itself more æsthetic than positively scientific ingredients, renders us all double citizens of the real and the imaginary world. The majority of us chiefly live in the former, and visit the latter only in rare moments, which to some mean only recreation, but to others consecration and exaltation. A small minority, however, renounce their citizenship of the actual world and withdraw wholly to the world of imagination, which has been conjured up by the artistic fancy of mankind in thousands of years of creative activity. Moreau was a citizen of the shadow-world, wherein he spent, an eternal Phæacian Sunday, and he never grew weary of lingering over its beauties. We learn by his representations to know it thoroughly in all its parts. Its landscapes are curiously jagged rocks which seem to be formed of corals; chalk plains with moon-glimmering reflections; mountain steeps in cumulous clouds; lakes and seas of oil, opalescent or charged with indigo. The animals that people this hypnotising paradise are unicorns with silvery coats, amazing dragons that are too curly to inspire fear, milk-white flying-horses, seven-headed hydras standing bolt upright on the tips of their tails, Stymphalian birds with women’s faces, sphinxes, chimæras, and phœnixes. Even the flamingos, which come nearest to the terrestrial fauna, are here with the tips of their wings dipped, as it were, in blood, immeasurably more oddly pathetic than we know them. The flora exhibits (besides monumental marvels of Peru, which remind one of the rose windows in Gothic cathedrals) a “mystic blossom,” a somewhat calla-like creation that sprouts forth from a luminous rock in the blue, mirroring mere, and on its slender summit, between great high leaves, bears the Blessed Virgin surrounded by a dazzling halo. The spiritual beings that move amidst these marvellous animals and plants, are gods, heroes, and poets: Tyrtæus, Orpheus, Hesiod, Sappho, Jason, Helena, Odysseus, Penelope, Pasiphae, Hercules, Dejanira, Œdipus, Jupiter, Apollo, the Muses, Semele, Leda, Europa, Prometheus, the Oceanides, Moses, Buddha, Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan; the acts or, more correctly, the