There are two of Pater’s studies, _The Child in the House_ and _Emerald Uthwart_, with which it is obvious that a certain autobiographical thread is interwoven. But it is necessary to resist the temptation to take either of them as in any sense a literal representation of facts. Rather it may be said that Pater’s early years supplied him with a delicate background of reminiscence, upon which he embroidered a richer ornament of dreamful thought, using, in his own phrase, the finer sort of memory. It is clear, however, that he was instinctively alive to impressions of sense, and that his mind was early at work observing and apprehending a certain quality in things perceived and heard, which he was afterwards to recognise as beauty. He had few outbursts of high spirits or unreasoning glee; it was rather a tranquil current of somewhat critical enjoyment; but he was sensitive to a whole troop of perceptions, of which the normal child would hardly be conscious—the coolness of dark rooms on hot summer days, the carelessly ordered garden, the branching trees, the small flowers, so bright of hue, so formal of shape, the subtle scents of the old house, the pot-pourri of the drawing-room, the aroma of old leather in the library; for it was about the house, the familiar rooms, that Pater’s memory persistently dwelt, rather than on the wider prospect of field and hill. There is a beautiful and interesting passage in which Pater embalmed his view of the permanence of these early impressions:— “The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as ‘with lead in the rock for ever,’ giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise.” But he points out clearly enough that very little that is critical is intermingled with the perceptions of childhood:— “It is false to suppose that a child’s sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life.” There were two strains of sentiment which he discerned to have chiefly coloured his childish thoughts. One was “the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things ... marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness ... which might lead him, one day, how far!”