and that serves often to conceal him from us. The
presence of an alien element in Wordsworth's art is, of course,
recognized 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. In poetry,
in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this
principle in a measure; these, by their sterility, are a type of
beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit
of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are
identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance
of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like
him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in
this art of impassioned contemplation. Their work is not to teach
lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends, but
to withdraw the thoughts for a while from the mere machinery of life,
to fix them, with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those
great facts in man's existence which no machinery affects, 'on the
great and universal passions of men, the most general and interesting
of their occupations, and the entire world of nature'--on 'the
operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible
universe, on storm and sunshine, on the revolutions of the seasons,
on cold and heat, on loss of friends and kindred, on injuries and
resentments, on gratitude and hope, on fear an