SOURCE: “The Prose Architecture of Mental Abodes: The Presence of Inhabitable Language” in Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: “Under-Textures” and “After-Thoughts” in Walter Pater, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 40-55.

In the following excerpt, Fellows analyzes the nature of Pater's prose, describing it as stationary yet penetrating.

The wind, persistent, the mantle, purple, the blond hair in the persistent wind against the chiselled features. Like a corpse, a mummy wrapped in a winding sheet, bound against that persistent wind which “for many years … had its dwelling among the mountains, [and] came as a stranger, darkly. Persistent now.”

—Pater, anonymously unwritten, in an act of sabotage based on baseless animus

At twilight he came over the frozen snow. As he passed through the stony barriers of the place the world around seemed to curdle to the center—all but himself, fighting his way across it, turning now and then right-about from...