The Wandering Jew has been represented in many ways, with stress placed on various aspects of his life and character. He has been depicted psychologically, as a suffering human being, mythologically to illustrate the growth and change in life, religiously to preach certain tenets and beliefs, and symbolically to show forth the soul of man. He appears symbolically as the creature accursed of God, driven forever in the face of doom. Shelley and others show him as vainly attempting suicide, but living on, anguished yet deathless, in the face of every effort to take his own life as in the teeth of torture from others. He stands at once for the undying power of God's plan, and, as in Robert Buchanan's version, for the typified failure of Christ's mission. He is used to prove that Christ's second coming is near, and to prove also that He will never come. To the Christian he stands for the evidence of Christ's power of divinity, while to the Jew he is a symbol of that unhappy race that wanders ever, with no home in any land. Besides those mentioned, other English and American writers who have made use of the legend are Kipling; Bram Stoker, who discusses him in his assembly of Famous Impostors; M. D. Conway, who gives various versions of the story; David Hoffman, Henry Seton Merriman, S. Baring-Gould, W. H. Ainsworth, and others. A legend closely associated with this and yet separate, is that of a woman who bore the curse of eternal wandering. One version brings in Herodias as the doomed woman, while the character of Kundry in _Parsifal_ represents another feminine wanderer. William Sharp, in his _Gypsy Christ_, gives the story differently still, saying that it is not correctly told in _Parsifal_. As Sharp tells it, it is a piece of tragic symbolism. Kundry, a gypsy woman of evil life, mocks Christ on Golgotha and demands of Him a sign, to whom He says, "To thee and thine I bequeath the signs of my Passion to be a shame and horror among thy people forevermore!" Upon her hands and feet appear the stigmata of His wounds, never to fade away, and to be borne by her descendants in every third generation. Various ones of her descendants are crucified, and wherever the wanderers go on earth they bear the marks of horror. The curse would be lifted from them only when a Gypsy Christ should be born of a virgin; but then the Children of the Wind should be dispersed and vanish from among men. In the last chapter Naomi prophesies that she is to give birth to the Gypsy Christ.