John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. Preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of "seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal, assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions; associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for or think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible world, his longings for beauty intensifying his fear of death. He loved to gaze on dead faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self, whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and partings," marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "The very colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of penitence and peace." "For a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent."