tal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our
spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a
little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one
might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the
least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal
meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose
winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared
by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous
love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness.
And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear.

But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for
the children:

O the big red sun,
And the wide white world,
And the nursery window
Mother-of-pearled;

And the houses all
In hoods of snow,
And the mince-pies,
And the mistletoe;

And Christmas pudding,
And berries red,
And stockings hung
At the foot of the bed;

And carol-singers,
And nothing but play--
O baby, this is
Christmas Day!

XXII

ON RE-READING WALTER PATER

It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of
which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during
two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so
pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all
the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance
of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more
and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most
valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his
work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian
characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized
also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true
disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his
graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a
sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an
artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a
writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of
a way of life at once ennobli