After a
time, these long sentences of Mr. Pater's come to have the charm of an
elaborate piece of music, and the unity of such music also.

I have suggested that the essay on Wordsworth is probably the most recent
bit of work contained in this volume. If one might choose between so
much that is good, I should be inclined to say it is the finest also. The
essay on Lamb is curiously suggestive; suggestive, indeed, of a somewhat
more tragic, more sombre figure, than men have been wont to think of in
connection with the author of the Essays of Elia. It is an interesting
aspect under which to regard Lamb, but perhaps he himself would have had
some difficulty in recognising the portrait given of him. He had,
undoubtedly, great sorrows, or motives for sorrow, but he could console
himself at a moment's notice for the real tragedies of life by reading
any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio edition.
The essay on Sir Thomas Browne is delightful, and has the strange,
personal, fanciful charm of the author of the Religio Medici, Mr. Pater
often catching the colour and accent and tone of whatever artist, or work
of art, he deals with. That on Coleridge, with its insistence on the
necessity of the cultivation of the relative, as opposed to the absolute
spirit in philosophy and in ethics, and its high appreciation of the
poet's true position in our literature, is in style and substance a very
blameless work. Grace of expression and delicate subtlety of thought and
phrase, characterise the essays on Shakespeare. But the essay on
Wordsworth has a spiritual beauty of its own. It appeals, not to the
ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross
confusion of ethical and aesthetical problems, but rather to those who
desire to separate the gold from the dross, and to reach at the true
Wordsworth through the mass of tedious and prosaic work that bears his
name, and that serves often to conceal him from us. The presence of an
alien element in Wordsworth's art is, of course, recognised by Mr. Pater,
but he touches on it merely from the psychological point of view,
pointing out how this quality of higher and lower moods gives the effect
in his poetry 'of a power not altogether his own, or under his control';
a power which comes and goes when it wills, 'so that the old fancy which
made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems
almost true of him.' Mr. Pater's earlier essays had their purpurei
panni, so eminently suitable for quotation, such as the famous passage on
Mona Lisa, and that other in which Botticelli's strange conception of the
Virgin is so strangely set forth. From the present volume it is
difficult to select any one passage in preference to another as specially
characteristic of Mr. Pater's treatment. This, however, is worth quoting
at length. It contains a truth eminently suitable for our age:

That the end of life is not action but contemplation--_being_ as
distinct from _doing_--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some
shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality.