o send me here in the other time. I'm not much
visibly the braver perhaps, but think how I'm the happier! The misty
spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these years
one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do the spires and
towers do for these people? Are they wiser, gentler, finer, cleverer?
My diminished dignity reverts in any case at moments to the naked
background of our own education, the deadly dry air in which we gasp for
impressions and comparisons. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate
calmness; I accept it with a dogged pride. We're nursed at the opposite
pole. Naked come we into a naked world. There's a certain grandeur
in the lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young
imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which has to
invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-air, with
a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we dwell. Noblesse
oblige--Oxford must damnably do so. What a horrible thing not to rise
to such examples! If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing of
interest you may go through life with her blessing; but if you let it
stand unhonoured you're a worse barbarian than we! But for the better or
worse, in a myriad private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the
youthful sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of
the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls. Think of
the centuries' tale of dead lads--dead alike with the end of the young
days to which these haunts were a present world, and the close of
the larger lives which the general mother-scene has dropped into less
bottomless traps. What are those two young fellows kicking their heels
over on the grass there? One of them has the Saturday Review; the
other--upon my soul--the other has Artemus Ward! Where do they live,
how do they live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How can they
read Artemus Ward under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think
loveliest in all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that
one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice
and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a hundred
years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken cornice. Don't
pretend it's not a common thing to have one's bosom friend at another
college. Pray was I committed to common things? He was a charming
fellow. By the way, he was a good d