So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, in lieu of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large symbolism,--that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because each generation of artists is irresistibly impelled to provide them with quite fresh adventures.... And no one can, with certainty, say why. One merely knows that these favored romantic myths, to whom just now I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols phrases it, in approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a pre-figuring of Satan or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison. And this one sometimes guesses to be--perhaps--the pith of such myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew--besides the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book which voiced more fatuous blather than _Ben-Hur_,--has had put to his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera. Well! here--just for an instant to recur to _Fantastica_, as a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice of the urbane,--here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot. They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope, the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Reverend George Crowley. § 33