The number of Dom Manuels, of Jurgens, in American letters is countless. Thoreau disguised himself as an Indian. Whitman went through every possible form of cosmic avatar. Edgar Allan Poe was haunted by the dead. A Southerner like Cabell, like him fanciful and fantastic, but sad, obsessed by the memory of a dear, departed one, his whole life was akin to a nightmare. A daydreamer and a somnambulist, he too lived in Dreamland, on Fairy Island, and in the domain of Arnheim. Had Jurgen been more crafty, had Dom Manuel been wiser, had Florian de Puysange been less of the _roué_, they would all have felt at home in Edgar Allan Poe’s imaginary fatherland. But Poe did not care for allegory. He cultivated dreams for their own sake. The fusion between object and subject, the real and the ideal, life and dreams, was complete in his writings. He never woke up. The nearer we get to Cabell’s “Jurgen,” the more we see the transformation and alteration of the “personality picture” or the ideal man in America. The Civil War came. The great men of the day were politicians and soldiers,--Grant, Lincoln. Then came the “dreadful decade” followed by the advent of the realist, Theodore Roosevelt, Edison, Carnegie, Wilson and now Henry Ford. Some of these idols were to be blasted by Mark Twain’s vengeful irony. But Mark Twain himself was destined to prove, through his books, that the man of dreams was dead. He buried him himself without much respect, but not without incidentally damning the whole race of man in his posthumous book, “The Mysterious Stranger,” which is a veritable challenge to life and to the impossibility of its ever bearing supermen. Praise be to the Lord, “Jurgen” was born in 1919, and the rights of imagination were restored. Chivalry, the troubadours’ _gay saber_ came back to life in America. The French eighteenth-century _conteurs_, Voltaire and Anatole France to-day had somebody to talk to in the United States. “The High Place” shows unmistakable traces of Anatole France’s influence. There are curious affinities between M. d’Astarac and Florian de Puysange. Saint Hoprig seems to have been taken out bodily from the “Revolt of the Angels,” after having drunk a dram or so in the company of Jerôme Coignard. At last we have an American novelist frankly going back to the source of art and free thought.