Pater's preoccupation with the intensely felt moment of sensual or aesthetic experience goes back to the 1850s and persists throughout his career. In a poem written in the summer of 1858, just before he matriculated at Oxford, he asks with fearful innocence, ‘Where are the dead?’ (qtd Wright I, 136). In his mature works his inability to answer this question leads him to consider how it is possible to live under the sentence of death-eternal, when the ephemeral individual life is lost in evolutionary history. The intensely felt moment is his answer.

The expanse of evolutionary history and the precious ephemerality of a single moment within it define Pater's appropriation of ‘art for art's sake’: ‘For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake’ (R 153). As this celebrated declaration from the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1868, 1873) testifies, it is time and, more specifically, the moment that distinguishes Pater's aestheticism from Gautier's conception of art pour l'art (1835) or Swinburne's appropriation of that term in William Blake (1868) (101).