“Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life.... The pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves.” And once again:— “On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they have emancipated us!” An eager intensity of feeling thrills through these impassioned sentences. One feels instinctively that the writer of these words, after years of blind and mute movements, like the worm in the cocoon, had suddenly broken free, and had seen his creased and folded wings expand and glitter in the sun. Art, friendship, perception, emotion, that was the true life he had been desiring so long; and yet, after all, what an inner life it was to be! There was no impulse to fling himself into the current of the world, to taste the life of cities, where the social eddy spun swift and strong; he was to be austere, self-centred, silent still. Only in seclusion was he to utter his impassioned dreams in a congenial ear. “Blitheness and repose!” these were to be the keynotes of the new life; a clear-sighted mastery of intellectual problems, a joyful perception of the beauties of art, a critical attitude, that was to be able to distinguish by practised insight what was perfect and permanent from what was merely bold and temporary. And so, light of heart, his imagination revelling at the thought of all the realms of beauty it was to traverse, undimmed and radiant, the dumb and darkened past providing the contrast needed to bring out the brightness and the hope of what lay before, Pater set out upon his pilgrimage. And yet there is a shadow. As he writes in one of the most pathetic sentences, in one of his later and most tender sketches, of just such another pilgrimage, “Could he have foreseen the weariness of the way!”