He would sometimes ask a student to join him in the vacation, which must have been a severe tax on one so independent and fond of seclusion as Pater, when he would coach him and walk with him. At the same time, says one of those who came within his circle in later days, it was felt that his relations with younger men were guided more by a sense of duty than by instinct. He was like Telemachus, “decent not to fail in offices of tenderness.” He was careful, says the same friend, to write and inquire about one’s interests and one’s progress. But it was clear that he was in a way self-centred, that he _depended_ on no one, but lived in a world of his own, working out his own thoughts with a firm concentration, and that though he was endlessly kind and absolutely faithful, yet that few made any vital difference to him. He was a steady friend, and always responsive to the charm of youth, of sympathy, of intellectual interest. But even those who were brought into close contact with him were apt to feel that far down in his nature lurked a certain untamed scepticism, a suspension of mind, that lay deeper than his hopes and even than his beliefs. But it was impossible to doubt his real tenderness of heart, his fellow-feeling, his goodness. Mr. Ward, who spent part of a summer vacation at this time in Pater’s company, writes:— “The month at Sidmouth made us rather intimate, and afterwards I often walked and lunched with Pater at Oxford. He had begun to publish then: the articles on ‘Coleridge’ and ‘Winckelmann’ in the _Westminster Review_ had appeared, and had made a great sensation in the University. Unfamiliar with Goethe at first-hand, and with the French romantics such as Théophile Gautier, the men of about my standing had their first revelation of the neo-Cyrenaic philosophy and of the theory of Art for Art, in these papers. None the less, even those of us who were most attracted by them, and men like myself to whom Pater was personally very kind, found _intimacy_ with him very difficult. He could be tremendously interesting in talk; his phrases, his point of view, were original and always stimulating; but you never felt that he was quite at one with you in habits, feelings, preferences. His inner world was not that of any one else at Oxford.” CHAPTER II EARLY WRITINGS I have thought it best in this study of a life marked by so few external events, to follow as far as possible the chronological order of Pater’s writings, for this reason; that though he revealed in conversation and social intercourse scarcely anything of the workings and the progress of his mind, yet his writings constitute a remarkable self-revelation of a character of curious intensity and depth, within certain defined limits.