He goes on to say that in this poetry, life seems to break from conventional things, and to realise experience, pleasure, and pain alike, as new and startling things for which no poetry, no tradition, no usage had prepared it. “Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age, at fire, snow, wine, the touch of water as one swims, the salt taste of the sea. And this simplicity at first hand is a strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity of Wordsworth. Desire here is towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it.” He shows that even Morris’s classical poems, such as _Jason_ and the _Earthly Paradise_, are filled and saturated with the medieval spirit; for it will be remembered that though the setting of the _Earthly Paradise_ is primarily medieval, yet the point of the poem is that we are supposed to be brought into contact with “a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.” The pagan element, he points out, is “the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life,” contrasting with the natural unspoiled joy in the beauty of the world. Early as the essay is, in the date of its composition, one feels that Pater, by omitting it from later editions, was deliberately retracing his steps, conscious that he had turned aside, in writing it, into a bypath of the spirit, and away from the more sober and serious ideal of his life. Its strange beauty is undeniable; but in its omission we see, as it were, a warning hand held up, indicating that not in this luxurious gloom, this enervating atmosphere, are the true ends of the spirit to be attained.