ious
expression of it, blends, or contrasts itself oddly with the everyday
detail, with the very stones, the Gothic stones, of a world he could
hardly have conceived, its medieval surroundings, their half-clerical
life here. Yet not so inconsistently after all! The builders of these
aisles and cloisters had known and valued as much of him as they could
come by in their own un-instructed time; had built up their
intellectual edifice more than they were aware of from fragments of
pagan thought, as, quite consciously, they constructed their churches
of old Roman bricks and pillars, or frank imitations of them. One's
day, then, began with him, for all alike, Sundays of course
excepted,--with an Ode, learned over-night by the prudent, who,
observing how readily the words which send us to sleep cling to the
brain and seem an inherent part of it next morning, kept him under
[216] their pillows. Prefects, without a book, heard the repetition of
the Juniors, must be able to correct their blunders. Odes and Epodes,
thus acquired, were a score of days and weeks; alcaic and sapphic
verses like a bead-roll for counting off the time that intervened
before the holidays. Time--that tardy servant of youthful
appetite--brought them soon enough to the point where they desired in
vain "to see one of" those days, erased now so willingly; and
sentimental James Stokes has already a sense that this "pause 'twixt
cup and lip" of life is really worth pausing over, worth
deliberation:--all this poetry, yes! poetry, surely, of their alternate
work and play; light and shade, call it! Had it been, after all, a
life in itself less commonplace than theirs--that life, the trivial
details of which their Horace had touched so daintily, gilded with real
gold words?

Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy meantime enjoys his
triumphs in the Green Court; loves best however to run a paper-chase
afar over the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, of the
sea, in the autumn twilight; and his dutifulness to games at least had
its full reward. A wonderful hit of his at cricket was long
remembered; right over the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof, was it?
or over the roof, and onward into space, circling there independently,
minutely, as Sidus Cantiorum? A comic poem on it in Latin, and a
pretty one in English, [217] were penned by James Stokes, still not so
serious but that he forgets time altogether one day, in a manner the
conv