Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer’s exact meaning be brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life.  For those of us, perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in the Horatian maxim of carpe diem, is one thrillingly charged with exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day.  To make the most, and to make the best of life!  Those who misinterpret or misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that precept.  We are to get “as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations shall be the finest.  Whether or not it is “simply for those moments’ sake,” our attempt must be to give “the highest quality,” remember, to those “moments as they pass.”  And who can fail to remark the fastidious care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems most worthy of dignifying the moment?  The senses are, indeed, of natural right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of Pater’s pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the “strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours,” but rather “the face of one’s friend,” ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic shock of simplicity, almost incongruity—­or “some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement,” or “any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment.”  There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, and a vulgar gospel of “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die,” whether or not both counsels start out from a realization of “the awful brevity” of our mortal day.  That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled sensuality.  Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life apparently not without its satisfactions.  But it is as stupid as it is infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater.  They may, indeed, have found aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by.  For such it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: