to nature, not in the spirit of Wordsworth, to exult in the freedom, the width, the tenderness, the energy, the vastness of it all; but rather as a great quarry of impressions, through which he walked with a perceptive gaze, selecting and detaching striking and charming effects, which could afterwards be renewed and meditated over in the home-keeping mind. None of his direct nature-touches, beautiful as they are, are penetrated with quite the same zest and emotion as his descriptions of nature when represented by some master-hand. It was the penetration of nature by human personality that gave it its value for Pater, its significance; and thus it comes about that his descriptions of scenes always seem, so to speak, to have a frame about them. He did not, like a poet, desire to escape from man to nature; but rather to suffuse nature at every point with humanity, to judge of it, to feel its beauty, not as the direct expression of the mind of God, but as it affected and appealed to man. It might have been imagined that so deliberate and precise a craftsman, with so definite a theory of his art, would perhaps have held on his way producing his careful masterpieces, content to put it on record that he had thought thus, and expressed it just so, content that the beautiful thing should be formed and fashioned, and made available for the use or delight of any that followed the same or a like path among the things of the soul. One could have supposed Pater indifferent to criticism and censure, deeming it enough not to be unfaithful to the heavenly vision. For to him, doubtless, the first and chiefest pleasure lay in the thrilling thought, that thought which sets the writer’s spirit all aglow, leaping into the mind, as it does, with an almost physical shock, and opening up a sudden vista of possibilities; as when a man, walking in a wood, comes suddenly across a ride, and sees the green space run to left and right, with its carpet of flowers, its leafy walls. And next to that first and sacred joy came the delight of the slow and careful conception, tracing the development, restricting the ramification, foreseeing the proportion. Then followed the later joy, the gradual embroidery of the austere outline, the laying of thread by thread, of colour by colour; and then the final pleasure of strict revision, of enriching the close texture, of strengthening the languid cadence, of refining the refined epithet, the eagerness to reach that impossible perfection that seemed to recede even as he drew near.