The closing phase of Pater’s 1868 review, ‘Poems by William Morris’, reappeared in 1873 as his Conclusion to The Renaissance. This chapter takes Pater’s engagement with Morris – both initially, and in these altered contexts – as a basis for thinking about his contribution to the development of English Studies. His evaluative criteria and methodology are also germane: what Pater values in Morris also envisions what he values in literature more generally. His account of ‘flux’ and perceptualism are familiar; but in the Morris review Pater is drawn more insistently to analogies with water – a fluidity expressing his aversion to walls, whether cultural or material, and a toleration of literature in dilution. Dilution is not commonly associated with literary virtues, not least because the twentieth-century re-founders of English tended to value concentration and concretion over any impression of looseness or dispersal. It is argued, however, that Pater recovers value from dilution – indeed, a dynamisation – though engagement with the language of cures associated with the then-fashionable alternative medicine of homeopathy.