I do not know what it was that made Pater withdraw the essay on “Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, from the later issue of _Appreciations_. Probably some unfavourable or wounding criticism, expressing a belief that he was closer to these exotic fancies then he knew himself to be. It is a strange and somewhat dreamy composition, rather a mystical meditation upon a phase of thought than a disentangling of precise principles. He takes William Morris’s _Defence of Guenevere_ as a text, saying that “the poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing tormented and awry with passion ... and the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.” He says that the secret of the enjoyment of this new poetry, with the artificial, earthly paradise that it creates, is “that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.” He compares the movement with the development of mystical religious literature, and defines the dangerous emotionalism of the monastic form of life, when adopted by persons of strongly sensuous temperament, saying that such natures learn from religion “the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction is towards objects of sense.” “Here, under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them.” One cannot help feeling that the above sentence may be the very passage, from the air of strange passion which stirs in it, for which the essay was condemned. Or again the following sentence: “He (Morris) has diffused through ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ the maddening white glare of the sun, and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down—the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish. The colouring is intricate and delirious, as of ‘scarlet lilies.’ The influence of summer is like a poison in one’s blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things.” There is indeed a certain disorder of the sense in this passage, the hint of a dangerous mood which seems to grasp after strange delights and evil secrets, in a reckless and haunted twilight. It is a veritable _fleur du mal_; and Pater, with his strong instinct for restraint and austerity of expression, probably felt that he was thus setting a perilous example of over-sensuous imagery, and an exotic lusciousness of thought.