ce, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless
Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power.
It visualizes and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and
flows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries,
of other men's souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it builds
up its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries.

One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he
"hated" to hear anything more about "the Poet Cowper," and nursing
his weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. The
most passionate and dedicated spirit he--to sulk, and dream, and
hide, and love, and "watch the others playing," in that quiet
retreat--since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into
consciousness!

And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, to
lay our offering, modest, secret, shy--a shadow, a nothing--at the
feet of this gracious Alma Mater; "who needs not June for Beauty's
heightening!" One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too
exclusive, too withdrawn. And something--what shall I say?--of
ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her
eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare,
exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know,
you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to the
yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of
Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a little
vulgar and silly?

Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters,
for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste--and
sometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But what
matter where he fled--he who always followed the "shady side" of
the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his
"Boxes of Alabaster," into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that
even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him.

And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he
shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life,
and the remotest glories of them. We see them all--from those
windows--a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective,"
than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect
when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those
are t