rld in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was
sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the
tangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can only
look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an
unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in
passing things.

In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars
wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the
liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the
absolute, his 'hunger for eternity,' and for his part he is content to
set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks
for no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he would
choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just
living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its
essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the
mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is
beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he
added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly
and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for
Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first,
and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is
passion,' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed
for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be
sure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
multiplied consciousness.' What he cared most for at all times was that
which could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; he
differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the _Renaissance_ tended
more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'the
discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the
imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even,
at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through,
_aux abois_ with nothingness, or with those off