One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought.  Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze “half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where.”  His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of Macaulay.  A quotation from Pater’s most brilliant essay, Leonardo Da Vinci, in the volume, The Renaissance:  Studies in Art and Poetry[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of his prose.  This description of Da Vinci’s masterpiece, the portrait of Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture—­

“Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary.  It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.  Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has passed!...  She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants:  and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”

The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,—­Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.

In addition to the chief novelists,—­Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,—­there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction.  In this class are the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire.  They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment.  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction.  This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life.  Unlike Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s powerful novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) is not pleasant reading.