To feel the charm it is necessary to be, to some extent, in sympathy with the philosophy of Pater. We see in him a naturally sceptical spirit, desiring to plunge beneath established systems and complacent explanations; and this, in common with an intense sensibility to every hint and intimation of beauty, apprehended in a serious and sober spirit; not the spirit that desires to possess itself of the external elements, but to penetrate the essential charm. Yet it is not the patient and untroubled beauty of nature, of simple effects of sun and shade, of great mountains, of wide plains, but of a remote and symbolical beauty, seen by glimpses and in corners, of which he was in search—beauty with which is mixed a certain strangeness and mystery, that suggests an inner and a deeper principle behind, intermingled with a sadness, a melancholy, that is itself akin to beauty. There is always an interfusion of casuistical and metaphysical thought with Pater’s apprehension of beauty; he seems to be ever desirous to draw near to the frankness, the unashamed happiness, of the Greek spirit, but to be for ever held back by a certain fence of scepticism, a malady of thought. Yet the beauty of which he takes account is essentially of a religious kind; it draws the mind to the further issue, the inner spirit. All the charm of ritual and ceremonial in worship has for Pater an indefinable and constant attraction. He is for ever recurring to it, because it seems to him to interpret and express an emotion, a need of the human spirit, whose concern is to comprehend if it can what is the shadowy figure, the mysterious will, that moves behind the world of sight and sense. We can trace the progress of thought in the case of Pater as clearly as it is possible to trace the thought of any recent writer; though reticent and even suavely ironical in talk, he was in his writings at once self-centred and _intime_. His own emotions, his own preoccupations, were absorbingly important to him; yet while he shrank from giving them facile utterance, he was irresistibly impelled to take the world into his confidence. He had none of the frank egotism of Wordsworth, none of the complacent belief in the interest of his revelations of himself; and yet there is no writer that speaks more persistently and self-consciously of his own point of view. He made little attempt to pass outside of it, and hardly disguised what he would fain have concealed. The instinct, indeed, for expression triumphs at every point over the instinct for reticence.