I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I _must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! "Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and the Gilded Age is justified in its children.