Contact with practical life, together with his first sight of Italian art, turned Pater’s thoughts gradually away from metaphysical speculation; and the final conversion came in his discovery of Otto Jahn’s _Life of Winckelmann_, which opened to him a new prospect. The teaching of Goethe had begun to seem too passionate, too sensual; the idealism of Ruskin degenerated too much into sentiment, and forfeited balance and restraint; Hegel and Schelling were too remote from life, with all its colour, all its echoes; but in Winckelmann he found one who could devote himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty, without any taint or grossness of sense; who was penetrated by fiery emotion, but without any dalliance with feminine sentiment; whose sensitiveness was preternaturally acute, while his conception was cool and firm. Here, then, he discovered, or appeared to himself to discover, a region in which beauty and philosophy might unite in a high impassioned mood of sustained intellectual emotion. Brasenose College, with which Pater’s life was to be identified, is one of the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford colleges. It has no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of colour and tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks out on a little piazza occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the Radcliffe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and the quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane, over the venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of Exeter, full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the south a dignified modern wing, built long after Pater’s election, overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln. There is no sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, about the place; it rather looks like a fortress of study. You enter the first court by a gateway under a tower. The interior of the buildings is still more sombre, with the smoke-stained walls and gables of friable stone. The Hall is on the south side, a lofty, dark-panelled place, with some good portraits. Beyond the Hall on the first floor is the Common-room, whither the Fellows adjourn after Hall, and which by day answers the purpose of a club-room. This is also an ample panelled chamber, with an air about it of grave and solid comfort.