ese exchequer-rolls and raked-up
records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of
Maitland's fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs' ponderous
conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends,
the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through
the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the same
directness of divine exposition as faith itself.

Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was
incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to him,
and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these moments
that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical assurances of
human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for explanation. After
all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful statement the fact of
a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why he had wrought it
forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense of the fact: it
could not resolve it in such a way that life would cease to be the
baffling attempt it was on the individual's part to restate to himself
his personal dreams.

Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it
was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over
all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave
the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the
breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not
some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical condition?

The sensation of St. Mark's Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the
chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the
psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of
what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a
while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull down
the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit thoroughfare, with
all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness, the immutable city
that neither mist nor modern architects could destroy, the immortal
academy whose spirit would surely outdare the menace of these reforming
Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither the cowardly betrayers of
her civilization who, even now before the barbarian was at her gates,
were cringing to him with offers to sell the half of her heritage of
learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all ab