to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed
by many of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the
colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:
some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above
ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The
spirits of the great men had disappeared.

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally,
less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and
comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually
executed those forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them as
one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in
the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm,
or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or
less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been
inflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him
as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were
wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly
struggle against years, weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was
not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he
had intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and the
morning had nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to think
that in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of
his trade to do in the business of renovation. He asked his way to
the workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given him at
Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers and
chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges
and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had
seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in
modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.
Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they
were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical.
How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,
mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on
the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked
by precision, mathematical stra