4 flower; Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond5 Till story and song and glory and all things | Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June moon Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre A star south-risen that first to music shone, 120 wears Yea, as warm night refashions the sere blood And thought remake their wan funereal fames, To fill the days up of his dateless year, A storm-star that the seafarers of love 100 The lamp-like star of Hero for a lamp; 4 Her story has been told by Malory, Tennyson (Idylls of the King, "The Last Tournament"), Arnold, Wagner, etc. Makes bright the blown brows of the wind-foot 5 The "Fair Rosamond" of Henry II. See Scott's year; The Talisman and Woodstock. 6 Virgil Aeneid, iv. 7 Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. 8 Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. ? Alluding to the story that after Phaethon's fatal Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it | And hers13 who made as God's own eyes to round, shine Last love-light and last love-song of the year's, The eyes that met them of the Florentine, Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.12 Wherein the godhead thence transfigured lit These are the signs wherethrough the year sees All time for all men with the shadow of it; move, Ah, and these too felt on them as God's grace The pity and glory of this man's breathing face; Full of the sun, the sun-god which is love, 190 For these too, these my lovers, these my twain, Sweep through the flameless fire of air that Before men's eyes incognisable God; rings From heaven to heaven with thunder of wheels Live with one life and at one mouth respire, Saw love and wrath and light and night and fire and wings And antiphones of motion-moulded rhyme The sphered signs, and leave without their Doubt and desire, and hope with fear for wife, Forms without form, a piteous people and Men and no men, whose lamentable kind The shadow of death and shadow of life compel Through semblances of heaven and false-faced hell, And in one golden sound their whole soul heard They have the night, who had like us the We, whom day binds, shall have the night as they, 200 This, though his ear be sealed to all that live, Through dreams of light and dreams of dark- We too shall surely pass out of the sun; 210 Out of the sound and eyeless light of things, Wide as the naked world and shadowless, Was such not theirs, the twain I take, and give Out of my life to make their dead life live Some days of mine, and blow my living breath Between dead lips forgotten even of death? So many and many ere me have given my twain Love and live song and honey-hearted pain, 240 Whose root is sweetness and whose fruit is sweet, So many and with such joy have tracked their feet, What should I do to follow? yet I too, I have the heart to follow, many or few story told, went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically2 blent on wall and floor, and some finer light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles, and with all its little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the thought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place, yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as if it were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design he then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story of his spirit-in that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear and favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and how his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house he could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul which had Westward, and eastward white with stars that come to be there of which indeed, through break, Between the green and foam is fair to take For any sail the sea-wind steers for me From morning into morning, sea to sea. WALTER PATER (1839-1894) THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE* the law which makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's lives, it had actually become a part; inward and out250 ward being woven through and through each other into one inextricable texture-half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, meres soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving, and could divide the main streams at least of the winds that had As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped him on with the burden 'which he carried, a certain distance. And as the man told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a little place in the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the *When originally published in 1878 this essay was denominated an "Imaginary Portrait," though it is doubtless in some measure autobiographical. As an account of the development of an extremely sensitive and impressionable youth, it holds a unique place in our literature. On Pater's philosophy and style, see Eng. Lit., p. 382. played on him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey. The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always called it, (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home, soon enough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really was an old house; and ar element of French descent in its inmates 1 Pater's fondness for participles partakes rathe. more of Latin than of English style. Note, too, the difficulty of resuming, in the close of this sentence, the grammatical subject of the beginning. 2 harmoniously 3 pure, unmixed * descent from Watteau, the old court-painter," the lack of better ministries to its desire of one of whose gallant pieces still hung in one beauty.† of the rooms-might explain, together with This house then stood not far beyond the some other things, a noticeable trimness and gloom and rumours of the town, among high comely whiteness about everything there the garden-walls, bright all summer-time with curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls Golden-rod, and brown-and-golden Wall-flower with which the light and shadow played so deli--Flos Parietis, as the children's Latin-reading cately; might explain also the tolerance of the father taught them to call it, while he was great poplar in the garden, a tree most often with them. Tracing back the threads of his despised by English people, but which French | complex spiritual habit, as he was used in after people love, having observed a certain fresh way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, making it sound, in never so slight a stirring of the air, like running water. The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way up at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against the blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit in autumn was so fresh. At the next turning came the closet which held on its deep shelves the best china. Little angel faces and reedy flutings stood out round the fireplace of the children's room. And on the top of the house, above the large attic, where the white mice ran in the twilight-an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrum of coloured silks, among its lumber-a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said, stood near a great city, which sent up heavenwards, over the twisting weathervanes, not seldom, its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sunshine. But the child of whom I am writing did not hate the fog, because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites which gleamed through its openings, on summer mornings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in those whites and reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in There may have been some family connection between Pater and Jean Baptiste Pater, a French painter of Watteau's time. years to do, Florian found that he owed to the place many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, certain inward lights under which things most naturally presented themselves to him. The coming and going of travellers to the town along the way, the shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of bright weather there, its singular darknesses which linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells-a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble-all this acted on his childish fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects and incidents never failed to throw him into a well-recognised imaginative mood, seeming actually to have become a part of the texture of his mind. Also, Florian could trace home to this point a pervading preference in himself for a kind of comeliness and dignity, an urbanity literally, in modes of life, which he connected with the pale people of towns, and which made him susceptible to a kind of exquisite satisfaction in the trimness and well-considered grace of certain things and persons he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way through the world. So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with the birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of his memory. The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the This last clause is to be attached to the subject, "child." Pater's sentences often wind thus, by a devious route, to an unexpected end. us. So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like those I have been speaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being indeed the early familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical conception, of rest and security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this for you and that for me, brings ever the unmistakable realisation of the delightful chez soi;3 this for the Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn white curtain and the shaded lamp; that, quite other, for the wandering Arab, who folds his tent every morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted ruins, or in old tombs. environment of early childhood. How indelibly,| as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for ever,'' giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater world without, steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage-way, through the wall of custom about us; and never afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, With Florian then the sense of home became or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to singularly intense, his good fortune being that Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our the special character of his home was in itself powers, manifold experiences-our various ex- so essentially home-like. As after many wanperiences of the coming and going of bodily derings I have come to fancy that some parts pain, for instance-belong to this or the other of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen, the well-remembered place in the material habita- true landscape, true home-counties, by right, tion that little white room with the window partly, of a certain earthy warmth in the yellow across which the heavy blossoms could beat so of the sand below their gorse-bushes, and of a peevishly in the wind, with just that particular certain gray-blue mist after rain, in the hollows catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, of the hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and on gusty mornings; and the early habitation | never seen farther south; so I think that the thus gradually becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system of visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents-the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound. sort of house I have described, with precisely those proportions of red-brick and green, and with a just perceptible monotony in the subdued order of it, for its distinguishing note, is for Englishmen at least typically home-like. And so for Florian that general human instinct was reinforced by this special home-likeness in the place his wandering soul had happened to Thus far, for Florian, what all this had de- light on, as, in the second degree, its body and termined was a peculiarly strong sense of home earthly tabernacle; the sense of harmony be-so forcible a motive with all of us-prompt- tween his soul and its physical environment ing to us our customary love of the earth, and became, for a time at least, like perfectly the larger part of our fear of death, that revul- played music, and the life led there singularly sion we have from it, as from something tranquil and filled with a curious sense of selfstrange, untried, unfriendly; though life-long possession. The love of security, of an habitimprisonment, they tell you, and final banish-ually undisputed standing-ground or sleepingment from home is a thing bitterer still; the place, came to count for much in the generation looking forward to but a short space, a mere and correcting of his thoughts, and afterwards childish goûter and dessert of it, before the as a salutary principle of restraint in all his end, being so great a resource of effort to pil-wanderings of spirit. The wistful yearning grims and wayfarers, and the soldier in distant quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some power of solace to the thought of sleep in the home churchyard, at least-dead cheek by dead cheek, and with the rain soaking in upon one from above. 1 Job, xix, 24. 2 a slight repast, a taste Referring to Locke's familiar figure for the state of mind at birth (Locke did not believe in innate ideas). The next figure is derived from the ancient practice of writing on tablets of wax. towards home, in absence from it, as the shadows of evening deepened, and he followed in thought what was doing there from hour to hour, interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to time, his spirit found itself alone; and in the tears shed in such absences there seemed always to 3 at home |