is 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 sto