At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

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.