And then, too, we see the child’s love for the outward forms of religion; “the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron’s vestment, sounding sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place.” Over this quiet and untroubled mood the shadow creeps. The boy begins to feel the touch of sorrow, of loss, of bereavement—the shadow of death. A cry heard on the stairs tells how the news of a death comes home to an aged heart; the little household pet, the Angora cat, sickens and dies, the tiny soul flickering away from the body; the young starling is caught and caged, but the boy cannot resist the cries of the mother-bird, the “sharp bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings,” and lets the sorrowing creature go. One realises with a painful intensity with what a shock of bewildered emotion Pater must have realised as a child the first lessons of mortality, “the contact,” as he wrote long afterwards, “of childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.” Yet in this region there falls a certain vein of what may be called _macabre_, which might be thought morbid were it not obviously so natural—a dwelling on the accidents of mortality, the gradations of decay. “He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him.”