The service at Brasenose retains several peculiar little ceremonies; the candles are lit at celebrations. The Junior Fellows bring in the elements with solemnity from the anti-chapel. When the procession leaves the altar, the dignitaries who carry the alms and the vessels bow at the lectern to the altar, and to the Principal as they pass his stall. The Vice-Principal bows to the altar on leaving his stall, and to the Principal as he passes out. These little observances, dating from Laudian, or even pre-Reformation times, were very congenial to Pater; and it was always observed that though kneeling was painful to him, he always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep reverence, during the whole administration of the Sacrament. Indeed his reverent and absorbed appearance in chapel will be long remembered by those to whom he was a familiar figure. His large pale face, his heavy moustache and firm chin, his stoop, his eyes cast down on his book in a veritable _custodia oculorum_—all this was deeply impressive, and truly reflected the solemn preoccupation which he felt. It is characteristic of him that he used to regret that the ardour with which the undergraduates sang the Psalms abated in the _Magnificat_, which to him was the Song of Songs. One of the very few pieces of writing composed during the years devoted to _Marius_ was the little Essay on “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” This was written in 1883, not long after the poet’s death, and is perhaps tinged with a memorial respect. Yet it is a subtle piece of praise, in which at the same time Pater seems delicately to weigh and test the author he is discussing; but one cannot help feeling that the innermost world of mystical passion in which Rossetti lived was as a locked and darkened chamber to Pater. He can look into it, he can admire the accessories of the scene, he can analyse, he can even sympathise to a degree; but it was after all to Pater an unnatural region; the heated atmosphere of passion, the supreme significance of love, being foreign and almost antipathetic to Pater’s serious and sober view of intellectual tranquillity. To be intellectually and perceptively impassioned indeed he desired; but the physical ardours of love, the longing for enamoured possession—with this Pater had nothing in common. He divined the truth indeed by a sort of analogy of sympathy. “To Rossetti,” he wrote, “life is a crisis at every moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man’s everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite to him.” And again:—