lustrate this opinion by
quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative
qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to
remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less
frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a
wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines,"
for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills";
"far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers
home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and
tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than
these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are;
what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is
particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural
effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two,
an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched,
and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral
country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite
fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"--"Two centuries of the
play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along
its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture:

The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the
shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still
a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds
were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple.

And again this picture of a wayside inn:

The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary
Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced
cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly
with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of
scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place
put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and
with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a
reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.

Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the
famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy
with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift
for conveying freshness, his constant happiness