s was not the case. "No," he said, "I don't think it is--I
seem more interested in people, in events, in thoughts than ever; and
one gets them from a purer spring--I don't know if I can explain," he
added, "but I think that one sees it all from a different perspective,
in a truer light, when one's own desires and possibilities are so much
more limited." When I said good-bye to him, he smiled at me and hoped
that I should repeat my visit. "Don't think of me as unhappy," he
added, and his wife, who was standing by him, said, "Indeed you need
not;" and the two smiled at each other in a way which made me feel that
they were speaking the simple truth, and that they had found an
interpretation of life, a serene region to abide in, which I, with all
my activities, hopes, fears, businesses, had somehow missed. The pity
of it! and yet the beauty of it! as I went away I felt that I had
indeed trodden on holy ground, and seen the transfiguration of humanity
and pain into something august, tranquil, and divine.

XVII

Oxford

There are certain things in the world that are so praiseworthy that it
seems a needless, indeed an almost laughable thing to praise them; such
things are love and friendship, food and sleep, spring and summer; such
things, too, are the wisest books, the greatest pictures, the noblest
cities. But for all that I mean to try and make a little hymn in prose
in honour of Oxford, a city I have seen but seldom, and which yet
appears to me one of the most beautiful things in the world.

I do not wish to single out particular buildings, but to praise the
whole effect of the place, such as it seemed to me on a day of bright
sun and cool air, when I wandered hour after hour among the streets,
bewildered and almost intoxicated with beauty, feeling as a poor man
might who has pinched all his life, and made the most of single coins,
and who is brought into the presence of a heap of piled-up gold, and
told that it is all his own.

I have seen it said in foolish books that it is a misfortune to Oxford
that so many of the buildings have been built out of so perishable a
vein of stone. It is indeed a misfortune in one respect, that it
tempts men of dull and precise minds to restore and replace buildings
of incomparable grace, because their outline is so exquisitely blurred
by time and decay. I remember myself, as a child, visiting Oxford, and
thinking that some of the buildings were almost shamefully ruinous o