He had won a secure fame, he was surrounded with respect and affection, he had fulfilled in patience and with much quiet happiness a great task; and so with no decay of faculty, no diminution of zest and enthusiasm, no melancholy foreboding, death came to him as a quiet friend and beckoned him smilingly away. Yet as we realise that this wistful, this inquisitive spirit had indeed drawn near to the gate, through which he had seen others pass, had indeed endured the passage, upon the incidents and impressions of which he had often meditated with an intense and reverent curiosity, the imagination torments and perplexes itself with the wonder as to what the end or the awakening may have been, whether indeed he ever knew, in some moment of swimming gaze and darkened eyes, that he should not return to life and daylight. We find our minds dwelling upon the words with which he ended the finest of all his essays, that on “Leonardo da Vinci,” written twenty-five years before. We lose ourselves “in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experienced the last curiosity.” CHAPTER VII PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS In younger days Pater was refined and dignified in appearance; there is an early photograph of him, shortly after he took his degree, with a soft eye, a serious gentle look, with regular and rounded features.[2] But this altered in later years; he became graver and heavier of aspect, and his face took on a character that has been described as “Japanese”; the pallor of his complexion, like old ivory, became more marked; but his eyes were his most eloquent feature, of a light hazel tint, almost grey-green, which lit up with an impressive light of animation and kindness when he was moved. [2] There is a portrait of him, a drawing by Simeon Solomon, made in 1872, now in the possession of Mr. Herbert Horne. There is also another drawing, a lithograph, by Mr. Rothenstein, included in the Oxford Portraits. Neither of these is considered wholly satisfactory by those who knew Pater best.