is, "I should like to see the
best, the best alone." I answered that either for time or eternity I had
always supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford
in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.

IV

Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any order
or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of the supreme
gratifications of travel for any American aware of the ancient pieties
of race. The impression it produces, the emotions it kindles in the
mind of such a visitor, are too rich and various to be expressed in the
halting rhythm of prose. Passing through the small oblique streets in
which the long grey battered public face of the colleges seems to watch
jealously for sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you
feel it the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through
it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs after
the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or that of the
mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old States of Germany.
The plain perpendicular of the so mildly conventual fronts, masking
blest seraglios of culture and leisure, irritates the imagination
scarce less than the harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching
portals, however, you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and
the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green
quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of
the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled
host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our arrival my friend and
I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge
that under-spans the walls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower,
delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty--the perfect
prose of Gothic--wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained
of day. We entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little
court that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more
lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed into
the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters on the
entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my unhappy
friend's responsive vibrations, even while feeling that they might as
direfully multiply as those that had preceded them. I may say that from
this time forward I found it difficult to distinguish in his c