of the sharp, harsh, exigent realities
of the outer world. Careless? Not utterly. These realities may be seen
by him. He may study them, be amused or touched by them. But they cannot
fire him. Oxford is too damp for that. The "movements" made there have
been no more than protests against the mobility of others. They have
been without the dynamic quality implied in their name. They have been
no more than the sighs of men gazing at what other men had left behind
them; faint, impossible appeals to the god of retrogression, uttered for
their own sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they should
be heard. Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power
of action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the
vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner
which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that
not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slain
seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to
them in their heyday. If the Colleges could be transferred to the dry
and bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more evidently
useful to the nation. But let us be glad there is no engineer or
enchanter to compass that task. Egomet, I would liefer have the rest of
England subside into the sea than have Oxford set on a salubrious level.
For there is nothing in England to be matched with what lurks in the
vapours of these meadows, and in the shadows of these spires--that
mysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford. Oxford! The very
sight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me with
most actual magic.

And on that moonlit night when I floated among the vapours of these
meadows, myself less than a vapour, I knew and loved Oxford as never
before, as never since. Yonder, in the Colleges, was the fume and fret
of tragedy--Love as Death's decoy, and Youth following her. What then?
Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls
would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours be undone, nor lost a
breath of her sacred spirit.

I floated up into the higher, drier air, that I might, for once, see the
total body of that spirit.

There lay Oxford far beneath me, like a map in grey and black and
silver. All that I had known only as great single things I saw now
outspread in apposition, and tiny; tiny symbols, as it were, of
themselves, greatly symbolising the