But for those whose pleasure it is to doubt and deny all spiritual life and being, the history of Theos Alwyn can be disposed of with much languid ease and cold logic, as a foolish chimera scarce worth narrating.  Practically viewed, there is nothing wonderful in it, since it can all be traced to a powerful exertion of magnetic skill.  Tranced into a dream bewilderment by the arts of the mystic Chaldean, Heliobas,—­tricked into visiting the Field of Ardath, what more likely than that a real earth-born maiden, trained to her part, should have met the dreamer there, and, with the secret aid of the hermit Elezar, continued his strange delusion?  What more fitting as a sequel to the whole, than that the same maiden should have been sent to him again in the great Rhine Cathedral, to complete the deception and satisfy his imagination by linking her life finally with his?—­It is a perfectly simple explanation of what some credulous souls might be inclined to consider a mystery,—­and let the dear, wise, oracular people who cannot admit any mystery in anything, and who love to trace all seeming miracles to clever imposture, accept this elucidation by all means,—­they will be able to fit every incident of the story into such an hypothesis, with most admirable and consecutive neatness!  Al-Kyris was truly a Vision,—­the rest was,—­What?  Merely the working of a poetic imagination under mesmeric influence!

So be it!  The Poet knows the truth,—­but what are Poets?  Only the Prophets and Seers!  Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven’s Fact beyond this world’s Fable.  Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—­we will give them a little of our gold,—­a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt and misprisal!  So say the unthinking and foolish—­so will they ever say,—­and hence it is, that though the fame of Theos Alwyn widens year by year, and his sweet clarion harp of Song rings loud warning, promise, hope, and consolation above the noisy tumult of the whirling age, people listen to him merely in vague wonderment and awe, doubting his prophet utterance, and loth to put away their sin.  But he, never weary in well-doing, works on, ... ever regardless of Self, caring nothing for Fame, but giving all the riches of his thought for Love.  Clear, grand, pure, and musical, his writings fill the time with hope and passionate faith and courage,—­his inspiration fails not, and can never fail, since Edris is his fount of ecstasy,—­his name, made glorious by God’s blessing, shall never, as in his perished Past, be again forgotten!

And what of Edris?  What of the “Flower-crowned Wonder” of the Field of Ardath, strayed for a while out of her native Heaven?  Does the world know her marvellous origin?  Perhaps the mystic Heliobas knows,—­perhaps even good Frank Villiers has hazarded a reverent guess at his friend’s great secret—­but to the uninstructed, what does she seem?