These conjectural kingdoms were, of course, the earliest chosen subject matter for poetic adornment everywhere: poets were, of course, the first to guess at what it would be most interesting to find beyond the black door: and every ancient religion, again, of course, grew up from people indulging in the two habits, now equally antique, of reciting poetry and of taking it seriously. They had at least the excuse that this poetry was magnificent, because in surveying and populating these post mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his most imposing reach of power.... Here he, indeed, has need of power: for he is here intent to make sport with his third great opponent, and to play with death; intent to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent to color roseately the dreadful face of doom, intent to detect in the skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile of reassurance. He has done this, handsomely. --Though, to be sure, these promised paradises are fugacious: over and over again has the Scriptural prophecy been fulfilled as to the heavens being rolled up like a scroll, and one by one the heavens pass away with no greater noise than is made by the staid commentaries of ethnologists. For a winter that will have no ending has oppressed the blissful fields of Aälu: the proud castle of Nin-kigal is pulled down, its seven gates are fallen away into dust; and only pedants now and then recall the lion-guarded golden thrones whereon sat crowned, and endowed with eternal youth, the chief ones and the sages of Babylon. Manannan holds court no more in Emhain. Instead, he amicably shares his somewhat lowlier estate in nothingness with Oannes and Ahura-Mazda; for all of these well know to-day that all promised paradises are fugacious.... Nor may the noblest of heroes any longer win to Xisuthros and that most lovely, nameless land, "at the mouth of the rivers," wherein contentment had no wasting away under the nibbling of time, and human grief was like the fragment of some word in a torn manuscript written in a language which no man any more remembers. The white vase of Thoth is broken, also: he has no need of it to-day, he has desisted from the weighing and the taxing of ghostly imports, now that the narrow bridge which led across the abyss to Sraosha's thousand-pillared palace upon Demavend, has for some while been closed to traffic. For these promised paradises are really very fugacious.... So the carved and shining house of E-Sagila is decayed; and Olympos may not claim to oversee and rule the doings of gods and men from a rather modest official altitude of 9,754 feet. Only the professorial in quest of solar myths now care to thrust and poke, like rag-pickers, among the dust-heaps that were Gimli and Audlang and Vidblain: and time strips every paradise alike of its delights and its believers. Yet, at forty-five, one does not really marvel at the flying of felicity anywhence. And so it seems a stranger pillagement that all the hells,