“He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion of things—the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around him, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of sight, must count with him as but a dim problem.... He might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so close to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground.” No one can say that these sentences are obvious, clear, sharply cut. But they are full of a poetical suggestiveness, and sparkle with hidden lights like opalescent gems. Indeed, the writing of Pater may best be compared to the opal. It has not the clear facets, the limpid colour of the unclouded gem; but it is iridescent, rounded, shot with flashing lights and suffused with a milky mist of which one can hardly say whether it be near or far. It is this strange sense of depth, so inherent in a cloudy gem, that it gives one. One can measure to a millimetre the actual bulk of the jewel; but within that limit, what spent lights gleam, what misty textures roll! it is like a little coloured eyehole, through which one can discern the orbits of pale stars, the swimming vapors of some uncreated world. But the fact is that most of the objections that can be urged against _Marius_ are _prima facie_ objections; it is criticised mostly for not possessing qualities that it was not meant to have; it stands as one of the great works of art of which it may be said that the execution comes very near to the intention. Possibly Pater himself did not feel it to be so; he said once humorously to a friend that he would like to give him a copy of the second edition, because the first was “so very rough.” That is a criticism which could have entered into no mind except the author’s own. It remains a monument of sustained dignity and mellifluous precision. The style of it is absolutely distinctive and entirely new: the thing had never been done before; it is a revelation of the possibilities of poetical prose which the English language contains. The fact that it is not difficult to imitate is in its favour rather than otherwise, because the same is true of all great masters of individual style. But the feat was to discern and then to display a new capacity in English prose. It might have been said with truth that, before the advent of Pater, English prose could display qualities of lucidity, vigor, force; that it could lend itself to stately rhetoric and even glowing ornament; but it had never before exhibited the characteristic of seductive grace. And yet this was effected by Pater by the pure instinct for what was beautiful and melodious; he has no special preference for either the use of Saxon