Pater's Aesthetics

and how he's influenced the rest of the world.  Structure:  The Renaissance, Appreciations, Marius.  Wordsworth is key because he is the most immediate launching point.  The Romantics are also the splitting point:  Byron  & Shelley opposing the founders, Wordsworth & Coleridge, and Keats teetering somewhere between, trying to reconcile the points.  Pater's misreading of Wordsworth is one of his foundational claims:  here it is that he asserts contemplation is sterile (Appreciations).  Slowly, slowly building the foundations for this work--the culmination of my fling with academia, unless an MA in philosophy begins to woo me.

The Starting Point: from "Prospectus"

On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,

Musing in solitude, I oft perceive

Fair trains of imagery before me rise,

Accompanied by feelings of delight

Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed;

And I am consicous of affecting thoughts

And dear remembrances, who presence soothes

Or elevates the Mind, intent to weigh

The good and evil of our moral state.

--To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come,

Whether from breath of outward circumstance,

Or from the Soul--an impulse to herself--

I would give utterance in numerous verse.

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;

Of blessed consolations in distress;

Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;

Of joy in widest commonalty spread;

Of the individual Mind that keeps her own

Inviolate retirement, subject there

To Conscience only, and the law supreme

Of that Intelligence which governs all--

I sing:--"fit audience let me find though few!"

          --Wordsworth