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Rh Despair, and had heard the malignant voice of Diffidence counselling self-destruction. He had slept, too, in happier hours, in " the chamber called Peace, which is toward the sun-rising." He had lain down in the lilied meadows of Beulah Land, " sick with love " because of the pearly tow- ers and golden gates of the city of God, at which he gazed across the river of Death. What gives to The Pilgrim's Progress its notable intensity is the fact that Bunyan wrote it out of his own passionate experience; it is a transcript, in symbolic terms, of the bitter struggle which he waged in his own breast for what he believed to be the truth of God against the temptations of the world and the devil.

We go to The Pilgrim 's Progress, again, for its qualities as poetry, and for the naive charm of its character and incident. Bunyan's imagination works within narrow lim- its; his inventions are often wooden, his characters one- featured, his pictures lacking in mellowness and plastic grace. He is less creative than transcriptive. But within these denned limits he works with a graphic vividness, a persuasion, which is beyond cavil. No one who has ever read The Pilgrim 's Progress can think of the journey other- wise than as a personal experience. The landscape, the houses, the people, are given with few strokes, but with a quaint sturdy conviction which, aided by Bunyan's inimi- table talent for significant names, stamps them upon the memory forever. In his mind, and therefore in ours, they are not mere shadows and symbols. They may, indeed, begin by being so, but before long they must yield to the tyranny of his alchemical imagination, and become real places, become living, acting persons, full of foible and whim.

But perhaps the strongest appeal which the book makes to us to-day lies in the charm of its style. We have al- ready lost much of our interest in it as allegory, and the enormous development of the art of fiction since it was written has taken away much of its interest as narrative;