It is this peculiar insight which puts the great
dramatists in possession of the secrets of so many temperaments, the
springs of so many different personalities, the atmosphere of such
remote periods of time,--which, in a way, gives them power to make the
dead live again; for Shakespeare can stand at the tomb of Cleopatra
and evoke not the shade, but the passionate woman herself out of the
dust in which she sleeps. There has been, perhaps, no more luminous
example of the faculty of sharing the experience of a past age, of
entering into the thought and feeling of a vanished race, than the
peculiar divination and rehabilitation of certain extinct phases of
emotion and thought which one finds in the pages of Walter Pater. In
those pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly
sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity, a cloying
sweetness in the style of this accomplished writer. These are,
however, the perils of a very sensitive temperament, an intense
feeling for beauty, and a certain seclusion from the affairs of life.
That which characterises Mr.
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