those which look as if they might be haunted? Why, as soon as a
figure is seen, is the charm half-lost? And why, even when there is a
figure, is it kept so vague and mist-like? Would you know Hamlet's
father for a ghost unless he told you he was one? and can you remember
it long while he speaks in mortal words? and what would be Hamlet's
father without the terrace of Elsinore, the hour, and the moonlight? Do
not these embodied ghosts owe what little effect they still possess to
their surroundings, and are not the surroundings the real ghost?

Throw sunshine on to them, and what remains? Thus we have wandered
through the realm of the supernatural in a manner neither logical nor
business-like, for logic and business-likeness are rude qualities,
and scare away the ghostly; very far away do we seem to have rambled
from Dr. Faustus and Helen of Sparta; but in this labyrinth of the
fantastic there are sudden unexpected turns--and see, one of these has
suddenly brought us back into their presence. For we have seen why the
supernatural is always injured by artistic treatment, why therefore
the confused images evoked in our mind by the mere threadbare tale of
Faustus and Helena are superior in imaginative power to the picture
carefully elaborated and shown us by Goethe. We can now understand why
under his hand the infinite charm of the weird meeting of antiquity and
the Middle Ages has evaporated. We can explain why the strange fancy
of the classic Walpurgis-night, in the second part of _Faust_, at once
stimulates the imagination and gives it nothing. If we let our mind
dwell on that mysterious Pharsalian plain, with its glimmering fires and
flamelets alone breaking the darkness, where Faust and Mephistopheles
wandering about meet the spectres of antiquity, shadowy in the
gloom--the sphinxes crouching, the sirens, the dryads and oreads, the
griffons and cranes flapping their unseen wings overhead; where Faust
springs on the back of Chiron, and as he is borne along sickens for
sudden joy when the centaur tells him that Helen has been carried on
that back, has clasped that neck; when we let our mind work on all this,
we are charmed by the weird meetings, the mysterious shapes which elbow
us; but let us take up the volume and we return to barren prose, without
colour or perfume. Yet Goethe felt the supernatural as we feel it, as it
can be felt only in days of disbelief, when the more logical we become
in our ideas, the more we view