When we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of speech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature of man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into inaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought all the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow Pater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but of a quality in Blake’s language, a quality markedly less evident in the work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in this sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction from the practical power of words. Blake’s words say more by what they carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they say. His speech is highly _potential_; and when Pater talks of soul in literature he is talking of the potential element in the language of literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own works. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech, the thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing said its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and deeply influenced the writers who followed him--Wilde, Dowson, perhaps Mr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was an indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called Symbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned definitely allied himself. Pater’s expressed admirations for modern French books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers in a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not twenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger men whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen often claim Pater’s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school of Mallarmé. With his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure, and for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long before, but not with such close significance: “The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right way when it tends towards that.” Those words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of the aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation.