nature's work, seated up there so steadily amid the winds, as rain
and fog and heat pass by. More and more persistently, as he proceeds,
in the "Green Court" at last, they occupy the outlook. He is shown the
narrow [207] cubicle in which he is to sleep; and there it still is,
with nothing else, in the window-pane, as he lies;--"our tower," the
"Angel Steeple," noblest of its kind. Here, from morning to night,
everything seems challenged to follow the upward lead of its long,
bold, "perpendicular" lines. The very place one is in, its stone-work,
its empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them, as Uthwart
belongs, yielding wholly from the first; seem to question you
masterfully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the great
memories of the past, of this school;--challenge you, so to speak, to
make moral philosophy one of your acquirements, if you can, and to
systematise your vagrant self; which however will in any case be here
systematised for you. In Uthwart, then, is the plain tablet, for the
influences of place to inscribe. Say if you will, that he is under the
power of an "embodied ideal," somewhat repellent, but which he cannot
despise. He sits in the schoolroom--ancient, transformed chapel of the
pilgrims; sits in the sober white and brown place, at the heavy old
desks, carved this way and that, crowded as an old churchyard with
forgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or antipathetic
competitors, as it may chance. In a delightful, exactly measured,
quarter of an hour's rest, they come about him, seem to wish to be
friends at once, good and bad alike, dull and clever; wonder a little
at the name, and [208] the owner. A family name--he explains,
good-humouredly; tries to tell some story no one could ever remember
precisely of the ancestor from whom it came, the one story of the
Uthwarts; is spared; nay! petulantly forbidden to proceed. But the name
sticks the faster. Nicknames mark, for the most part, popularity.
Emerald! so every one called Uthwart, but shortened to Aldy. They
disperse; flock out into the court; acquaint him hastily with the
curiosities of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich heraldries of
the blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined overgrown spaces
where the old monastery stood, the stones of which furnished material
for the rambling prebends houses, now "antediluvian" in their turn; are
ready also to climb the scaffold-poles always to be found somewhe