s and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic shades
must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion found himself
less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a series of gardens
and spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They struck us as
the fairest things in England and the ripest and sweetest fruit of the
English system. Locked in their antique verdure, guarded, as in the case
of New College, by gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the
matted leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and
memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous youths
sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the injury of
their boot-heels, and with the great conservative college countenance
appealing gravely from the restless outer world, they seem places to
lie down on the grass in for ever, in the happy faith that life is all
a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon. This
charmed seclusion was especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of
it reached its climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions
and while we sat in fascinated flanerie over against the sturdy back of
Saint John's. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps broods upon
the lawn with a more effective air of property than elsewhere. Searle
dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour into golden figures. Any
passing undergraduate was a peg to hang a fable, every feature of the
place a pretext for more embroidery.

"Isn't it all a delightful lie?" he wanted to know. "Mightn't one fancy
this the very central point of the world's heart, where all the echoes
of the general life arrive but to falter and die? Doesn't one feel the
air just thick with arrested voices? It's well there should be such
places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs, invented to minister
to the book-begotten longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked
and believe unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all's well in
a world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth and
fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful unachieved
especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world's made--work's over.
Now for leisure! England's safe--now for Theocritus and Horace, for
lawn and sky! What a sense it all gives one of the composite life of
the country and of the essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank
heaven they had the wit t