a great surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs and signals that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; we are furnished with certain charts which tell us “here there be water-pools,” “here is a waste place,” “here a high hill riseth,” and we find as we journey that so it is.  But, happily, by the very nature of the case, we can never put the whole of the picture together, we can never recover the perfect utterance of the Lost Word, we can never say “here is the end of all the journey.”  Man is so made that all his true delight arises from the contemplation of mystery, and save by his own frantic and invincible folly, mystery is never taken from him; it rises within his soul, a well of joy unending.

Hence it is that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into the form of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by the part put for the whole.  Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as it was with the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a sense of completeness.  With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentence concerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there is the shadow of a catholic survey of all things; and so in a less degree it is as we read of the translation of Galahad.  Still, the Rose and the Graal are but symbols of the eternal verities, not those verities themselves in their essences; and in these later days when we have become clever—­with the cleverness of the Performing Pig—­it is a great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications of the things which really are.  There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don Quixote—­for those who can understand—­but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, “The Ghost-Ship,” which gives its name to this collection of tales.  Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity:  the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London and the sea; the farmer grumbling at the loss of so many turnips; the captain of the weird vessel acknowledging the justice of the claim and tossing a great gold brooch to the landlord by way of satisfying the debt; the deplorable fact that all the decent village ghosts learned to riot with Captain Bartholomew Roberts; the visit of the parson and his godly admonitions to the Captain on the evil work he was doing; mere craziness, you will say?

Yes; but the strange thing is that as, in spite of all jocose tricks and low-comedy misadventures, Don Quixote departs from us with a great light shining upon him; so this ghost-ship of Richard Middleton’s, somehow or other, sails and anchors and re-sails in an unearthly glow; and Captain Bartholomew’s rum that was like hot oil and honey and fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, has become for me one of the nobilium poculorum of story.  And thus did the ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempest of wind—­to what unimaginable seas of the spirit!