hrobbing music, or flowers, behind him, as he passes, careless of
them, unconsciously, through the world, the school, the precincts, the
old city. Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are deterred for
a while, even among the rich sights of the venerable place, as he walks
out and in, in his prim gown and purple-tasselled cap; goes in, with
the stream of sunlight, through the black shadows of the mouldering
Gothic gateway, like youth's very self, eternal, immemorial, eternally
renewed, about those immemorially ancient stones. "Young Apollo!"
people say--people who have pigeon-holes for their impressions,
watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise books. His very dress
seems touched [221] with Hellenic fitness to the healthy youthful form.
"Golden-haired, scholar Apollo!" they repeat, foolishly, ignorantly.
He was better; was more like a real portrait of a real young Greek,
like Tryphon, Son of Eutychos, for instance, (as friends remembered him
with regret, as you may see him still on his tombstone in the British
Museum) alive among the paler physical and intellectual lights of
modern England, under the old monastic stonework of the Middle Age.
That theatrical old Greek god never took the expressiveness, the lines
of delicate meaning, such as were come into the face of the English
lad, the physiognomy of his race; ennobled now, as if by the writing,
the signature, there, of a grave intelligence, by grave information and
a subdued will, though without a touch of melancholy in this "best of
playfellows." A musical composer's notes, we know, are not themselves
till the fit executant comes, who can put all they may be into them.
The somewhat unmeaningly handsome facial type of the Uthwarts, moulded
to a mere animal or physical perfection through wholesome centuries, is
breathed on now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influences
from past and present a thousandfold, crossing each other in this late
century, and yet at unity in the simple law of the system to which he
is now subject. Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and healthy
nature, an untainted [222] physique, and limited by it, those combining
mental influences leave the firm unconscious simplicity of the boyish
nature still unperplexed. The sisters, their friends, when he comes
rarely upon them in foreign places, are proud of the schoolboy's
company--to walk at his side; the brothers, when he sees them for a
day, more considerate than of ol