But when he would have touched the Swan’s daughter, the delight of gods and men, she vanished, precisely as a touched bubble is shattered into innumerable sparkling bits, and over three thousand of them he pursued and captured in all quarters of the earth, for, as he said of himself, Don Juan Tenorio had the heart of a poet, which is big enough to be in love with the whole world, and like Alexander he could but wish for other spheres to which he might extend his conquests, and each one of these sparkling bits of womanhood glittered with something of that lost Helen’s loveliness, yet, howsoever various and resistless were their charms, and howsoever gaily he pursued them, singing ever-new songs, and swaggeringly gallant, in his fair, curly wig and his gold-laced coat adorned with flame-colored ribbons, yet he, the eternal pursuer, was in turn pursued by the malevolence of Heaven, in, as it seemed, the shape of an avenging horseman who drew ever nearer unhurriedly, until at last the clash of rapiers and the pleasant strumming of mandolins were not any longer to be heard in that golden and oleander-scented twilight,—because of those ponderous, unhurried hoofbeats, which had made every other noise inaudible,—and until at last he perceived that both the rider and the steed were of moving stone, of an unforgotten stone which was gray and lichen-crusted. But when fearlessly he encountered the overtowering statue, and had grasped the horse about its round cold neck, he saw that the stone rider was lifeless, and was but the dumb and staring effigy of a big man in armor which was inset with tinsel and with bits of colored glass. It was the bungled copy and the parody of a magnanimous, great-hearted dream that he was grasping, and yet it was a part of him, who had been a poet once, but was now a battered old pawnbroker, for in some way, as he incommunicably knew, this parodied and not ever comprehended Redeemer and he were blended, and they were, somehow, laboring in unison to serve a shared purpose. He derided and he came too near to a mystery which he distrusted, and which yet (without his preference having been consulted in the affair) remained a part of him, as it was a part of all poets, even of a cashiered poet, and a part very vitally necessary to the existence of a Jurgen. A Jurgen had best not meddle with such matters one half-second sooner than that dimly foreseen, inevitable need arose for a Jurgen also to be utilized in the service of this mystery, without having his preference in the affair consulted. The aging pawnbroker was a little afraid. He climbed gingerly down from the tall pedestal of Manuel the Redeemer, he descended from that ambiguous tomb upon which he was trampling, he stepped rather hastily backward from that carved fragment of the crag of Prometheus. He stepped backward, treading beyond the confines of the golden mirror which was worshipped at Caer Omn; and he was thus released from its magic.