It was ingeniously said of Pater, that he was a philosopher who had gone to Italy by mistake instead of to Germany. There is a real truth in this epigram. He had a deep-seated sense of the mysterious inner relation of things, an intense desire to discern and disentangle the bare essential motives of life; but instead of attacking this in the region of pure and abstract thought, he touched it through the sense of beauty. It was beauty that seemed to him the most characteristic, the most significant thing in the world, that beauty touched with strangeness of which he so seriously spoke; and his preoccupation was to penetrate the strangeness, to trace the mystery back to primal emotion, while he watched, with the intensest eagerness and the most sacred thrill, the rich accumulation of beauty, apprehended and expressed by so many personalities, such varied natures, which the human race acquired and made its own, leaving its fine creations to exist as monuments of its currents and movements, like the weed-fringed posts that mark the sea-channel over the estuary’s sands; while they gathered year by year the added beauty of age and association, yet never losing the pathos, the heart-hunger, the unfulfilled desire, that hangs like a sweet and penetrating aroma round the beautiful things that men have made and loved, and have been forced to leave behind them. The passionate desire to create and express, followed by the consecration of sorrow and darkness, these two strains mingled for Pater into a strain of high solemnity and pathetic sweetness.