that, with hundreds of passengers daily, the one had become little
better than a suburb of the other. What more could extensionists demand?
As for me, I was disheartened. Bitter were the comparisons I drew
between my coming to Oxford and the coming of Marius to Rome. Could it
be that there was at length no beautiful environment wherein a man might
sound the harmonies of his soul? Had civilisation made beauty, besides
adventure, so rare? I wondered what counsel Pater, insistent always upon
contact with comely things, would offer to one who could nowhere find
them. I had been wondering that very day when I went into Ryman's and
saw him there.

When the tumult of my disillusioning was past, my mind grew clearer. I
discerned that the scope of my quest for emotion must be narrowed. That
abandonment of ones self to life, that merging of ones soul in bright
waters, so often suggested in Pater's writing, were a counsel impossible
for to-day. The quest of emotions must be no less keen, certainly, but
the manner of it must be changed forthwith. To unswitch myself from my
surroundings, to guard my soul from contact with the unlovely things
that compassed it about, therein lay my hope. I must approach the Benign
Mother with great caution. And so, while most of the freshmen 'were
doing her honour with wine and song and wreaths of smoke, I stood aside,
pondered. In such seclusion I passed my first term--ah, how often did
I wonder whether I was not wasting my days, and, wondering, abandon my
meditations upon the right ordering of the future! Thanks be to Athene,
who threw her shadow over me in those moments of weak folly!

At the end of term I came to London. Around me seethed swirls, eddies,
torrents, violent cross-currents of human activity. What uproar!
Surely I could have no part in modern life. Yet, yet for a while it was
fascinating to watch the ways of its children. The prodigious life of
the Prince of Wales fascinated me above all; indeed, it still fascinates
me. What experience has been withheld from His Royal High-ness? Was ever
so supernal a type, as he, of mere Pleasure? How often he has watched,
at Newmarket, the scud-a-run of quivering homuncules over the vert on
horses, or, from some night-boat, the holocaust of great wharves by
the side of the Thames; raced through the blue Solent; threaded les
coulisses! He has danced in every palace of every capital, played in
every club. He has hunted eleplants through the jungles o