quaint rooms on the second floor just below the
roof; of what he can see from his windows in the old black front
eastwards, with its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather and
natural decay (when you look close the very stone is a composite of
minute dead bodies) relieving heads like his so effectively on summer
mornings. On summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-flowers,
comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and left; seems to come
from beyond the Oxford meadows, with sensitive, half-repellent thoughts
from the gardens at home. He looks down upon the green square with the
slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross it on the way to chapel
on yellow Sunday mornings, or upwards to the dome, the spire; can watch
them closely in freakish moonlight, or flickering softly by an
occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind him. Yet how hard, how
forbidding sometimes, under [228] a late stormy sky, the scheme of
black, white, and grey, to which the group of ancient buildings could
attune itself. And what he reads most readily is of the military life
that intruded itself so oddly, during the Civil War, into these
half-monastic places, till the timid old academic world scarcely knew
itself. He treasures then every incident which connects a soldier's
coat with any still recognisable object, wall, or tree, or garden-walk;
that walk, for instance, under Merton garden where young Colonel
Windebank was shot for a traitor. His body lies in Saint Mary
Magdalen's churchyard. Unassociated to such incident, the mere
beauties of the place counted at the moment for less than in
retrospect. It was almost retrospect even now, with an anticipation of
regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars splashed far
up the narrow streamlets through the fields on May evenings among the
fritillaries--does the reader know them? that strange remnant just here
of a richer extinct flora--dry flowers, though with a drop of dubious
honey in each. Snakes' heads, the rude call them, for their shape,
scale-marked too, and in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from
some forgotten battle-field, the bodies, the rotten armour--yet
delicate, beautiful, waving proudly. In truth the memory of Oxford made
almost everything he saw after it seem vulgar. But he feels also
nevertheless, characteristically, that such local pride (fastus he
terms it) is proper [229] only for those whose occupations are wholly
congruous with