ended mysterious powers
that may really occupy it.'

When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for about
two years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reached
me when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my
life, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age of
seventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but his
form of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose,
requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's _Studies in the
History of the Renaissance_, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I
have the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prose
also could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or,
rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one calls
inspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; that
life (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a work
of art; from that book I realised for the first time that there was
anything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. I
caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of
curiosity into definite channels.

The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, an
occasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, the
definite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he was
unfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, than
I can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that my
first volume of verse was published; and it was through his influence
and counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in all
matters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in the
direction of sanity, restraint, precision.

I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delaying
way, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describe
supremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'He
does,' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked people to be
enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded
by the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist
is bound to go on a w