f
aspect; now that I am wiser I know that we have in these battered and
fretted palace-fronts a kind of beauty that fills the mind with an
almost despairing sense of loveliness, till the heart aches with
gratitude, and thrills with the desire to proclaim the glory of the
sight aloud.

These black-fronted blistered facades, so threatening, so sombre, yet
screening so bright and clear a current of life; with the tender green
of budding spring trees, chestnuts full of silvery spires,
glossy-leaved creepers clinging, with tiny hands, to cornice and
parapet, give surely the sharpest and most delicate sense that it is
possible to conceive of the contrast on which the essence of so much
beauty depends. To pass through one of these dark and smoke-stained
courts, with every line mellowed and harmonised, as if it had grown up
so out of the earth; to find oneself in a sunny pleasaunce, carpeted
with velvet turf, and set thick with flowers, makes the spirit sigh
with delight. Nowhere in the world can one see such a thing as those
great gate-piers, with a cognisance a-top, with a grille of iron-work
between them, all sweetly entwined with some slim vagrant creeper, that
give a glimpse and a hint--no more--of a fairy-land of shelter and
fountains within. I have seen such palaces stand in quiet and stately
parks, as old, as majestic, as finely proportioned as the buildings of
Oxford; but the very blackness of the city air, and the drifting smoke
of the town, gives that added touch of grimness and mystery that the
country airs cannot communicate. And even fairer sights are contained
within; those panelled, dark-roofed halls, with their array of
portraits gravely and intently regarding the stranger; the chapels,
with their splendid classical screens and stalls, rich and dim with
ancient glass. The towers, domes, and steeples; and all set not in a
mere paradise of lawns and glades, but in the very heart of a city,
itself full of quaint and ancient houses, but busy with all the
activity of a brisk and prosperous town; thereby again giving the
strong and satisfying sense of contrast, the sense of eager and
every-day cares and pleasures, side by side with these secluded havens
of peace, the courts and cloister, where men may yet live a life of
gentle thought and quiet contemplation, untroubled, nay, even
stimulated, by the presence of a bustling life so near at hand, which
yet may not intrude upon the older dream.

I do not know whe