Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

The sketch illustrates a paradox central to Pater's sensibility and writings: a leaning towards ascetic beauty apprehended sensuously. These are not so much stories – plotting is limited and dialogue absent – as psychological studies of fictional characters in historical settings often personifications of new concepts at turning-points in the history of ideas or emotion. Having a particular temperament under review he would ask what was the range of forms in which it might find expression.

Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist critic of art and literature and writer of fiction.