At the foot of the bed;

And carol-singers,
And nothing but play--
O baby, this is
Christmas Day!




XXII

ON RE-READING WALTER PATER


It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of
which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during
two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so
pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all
the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance
of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more
and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most
valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his
work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian
characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized
also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true
disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his
graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a
sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an
artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a