the three are one perfect flower. But it was his prose I loved, and not his
piety. His sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was
tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank
away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and
rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a great poet and teacher, Frank, and
therefore of course a most preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he
taught, but was an inspiration when he sang.

"Then there was Pater, Pater the classic, Pater the scholar, who had already
written the greatest English prose: I think a page or two of the greatest prose
in all literature. Pater meant everything to me. He taught me the highest form
of art: the austerity of beauty. I came to my full growth with Pater. He was a
sort of silent, sympathetic elder brother. Fortunately for me he could not talk
at all; but he was an admirable listener, and I talked to him by the hour. I
learned the instrument of speech with him, for I could see by his face when I
had said anything extraordinary. He did not praise me but quickened me
astonishingly, forced me always to do better than my best--an intense vivifying
influence, the influence of Greek art at its supremest."

"He was the Gamaliel then?" I questioned, "at whose feet you sat?"

"Oh, no, Frank," he chided, "everyone sat at my feet even then. But Pater was a
very great man. Dear Pater! I remember once talking to him when we were seated
together on a bench under some trees in Oxford. I had been watching the
students bathing in the river: the beautiful white figures all grace and ease
and virile strength. I had been pointing out how Christianity had flowered into
romance, and how the crude Hebraic materialism and all the later formalities of
an established creed had fallen away from the tree of life and left us the
exquisite ideals of the new paganism. . . .