It is in vain to ask ourselves whether the whole of this body of symbolism was ever present in any mind or group of minds. That is not the concern of Pater; his thought is rather to trace the many clear streams that have ever flowed within the single channel. He gathers the waters in a heap, as the prophet of old said. And the value of the essay is that it reveals something of the freshness and richness of the Greek mind, the exquisite power of seeing the beauty of sweet and simple things, of interweaving them into joyful fancies, embodying them into strange high-hearted tales; this tendency is the exact opposite of our own Celtic tendency, which loses itself in a vague and wistful melancholy in the thought of desolate spirits full of sorrow, that find their natural home in the soft weeping world, the moors in which the rain drops pitifully, the lonely hills. With the Greeks the sense of presences behind life, hovering near, revealing themselves in half-glimpses, took shape in the bright sparkling pageant of life—life that is determined in its brief space to press out the most poignant qualities of sorrow and laughter, of love and song. In the “Bacchanals of Euripides” the same point is touched on a different side; here we see the intoxicating sense of life and spring, the tingling impulse of the dance, coming out in the group of worshippers, the women who surround the woman-like god, touching thought exclusively through the senses. To these was given to feel “the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things—the echoes, the coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the morning.” Pater traces the plot of the strange beauty-haunted play, with its grotesque episodes, such as the indignity of the Bacchic passion seizing upon the old fatuous men, horribly renewing their youth in a kind of shameless parody of childish merriment, up to the appalling tragedy of the end, the doom of scepticism that yet involves a house and a nation in speechless grief and horror.