in sort of
ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the
clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with
perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the
flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of
dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet
deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear
with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who is
discharging a task of almost overwhelming sweetness, to which he
consecrates the early purity of the awakening day.

Such was Shorthouse's best and most romantic hour. He had a deep-seated
love of ritual; in spite of his inherited quietism--but for all that he
was a very liberal Churchman, of the school of Kingsley rather than of
the school of Pusey. Ritual was to him a beautiful adjunct; not a
symbolical preoccupation.

The mystery is why this very delicate and unique flower of art should
have sprung up on this particular soil. The most that one hopes for, in
the way of literary interest, from such surroundings, is a muddled
optimism, rather timidly expressed, based on the writings of Robert
Browning and Carlyle. Instead of this, one gets this _precieux_ antique
style, based upon the Bible and John Bunyan, and enriched by a
transparent power of tinging modern English with an ancient and
secluded flavour.

It shows how very little surroundings and influences have to do with
the growth of an artistic instinct, because in the case of Shorthouse
it seems to have been a purely spontaneous product. He followed no one;
he had the advantage of no trained criticism; because it seems that his
only critic was his wife, and though Mrs. Shorthouse appears in these
pages as a very courageous, loyal, and devoted woman, it is clear from
the record that she had no special literary gift.

The rarity of the thing is part of its wonder. It is possible to tell
upon the fingers of one hand, or at all events on the fingers of two
hands, the names of all the nineteenth-century writers who have handled
prose with any marked delicacy. There are several effective
prose-writers, but very few artists. Prose has been employed in England
till of late merely as a straightforward method of enforcing and
expressing ideas, in a purely scientific manner. Literary craftsmen
have turned rather to verse, and here the wonder grows, because one or
two specimens of Shorthouse's