Sober, steadfast, and demure,” etc—
imagery, which, in her opinion, could only be suggested by the associations of the spot. Many a worse theory in literature has been built upon foundations quite as slender; and so without committing ourselves to this interpretation, but with many thanks for the hint, and for all her civility, we respectfully bade adieu to the house, and its respectable occupants, with all necessary apologies for our intrusion.
Next morning, when I met Sir C—— at breakfast, he startled me by throwing upon the table two accurate and beautiful drawings of the well and mansion at Forest-Hill. He had produced them from the little sketches which I had seen him take upon the spot; and as they must have been made either very late at night, or very early in the morning, they were pleasing proofs of his kind disposition to gratify and oblige me, by the gift of a memorial of our Miltonian day, that must long afford me the additional pleasure of renewing its associations with him. In a few hours I bade farewell to Cuddesdon; but it so turned out that some of the acquaintances there formed, were subsequently renewed in other places, and in travel on the Continent. Nor can I forbear to mention with gratitude, that the kind attentions of the Bishop to his guest, so far from ceasing when I had taken leave, were continued through the whole period of my sojourn in England, and frequently opened to me unexpected sources of benefit and enjoyment.
But I must not conclude without observing, with reference to Forest-Hill, that Sir William Jones declares its groves to have been long famous for nightingales; while, at the same time, by distinctly recognizing the “distant mountains that seem to support the clouds,” as part of the view to be gained from the summit of the hill, he has done much to identify the spot as indeed the true scene of the poems. It is allowed that nothing like mountains are to be seen from Horton; but Sir William fully justifies the allusion, as suited to Forest-Hill, while at the same time he removes all ground for the hackneyed complaint, that this reference to mountains is a blemish to the poem, as being wholly unwarranted by the character of English scenery.
CHAPTER VIII.
Oxford—New College—Magdalen.
Now came my first day in Oxford—a day depended upon from boyhood, and from which I had expected more quiet and meditative delight than from any other enjoyment whatever. To every one who has made English literature and English history a study, I need not explain why. But Oxford has not only a literary prestige: it is so intimately connected with the history of our holy religion, that all other associations receive, as it were, an unction from this. Every college has its history; every stone, and every tree, and every turf, suggest ennobling reflections, as memorials of departed worth, but the hallowed memory of Martyrs sheds over all a deep and sober glory, that awes while it inspires. I know that our age has seen men, aye, and Oxford men, who could sneer at the reverend names of Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley: but who that has a heart not absolutely dead to generous emotion, but must feel a warm re-action in view of such impotent malignity? Who, in the days of the apostate and the dupe, can go to Oxford without blessing God that other days have left us the blessed example of men faithful unto death, and triumphing in the fire?
I stopped at “The Angel,” but it was not long before I found myself hospitably taken up, and transported to the house of a friend in the Turl, next door to Exeter College. My kind entertainer was one widely known throughout Anglo-Saxondom, not only by the books which he publishes, but by those also which he writes: and to whose elementary works on architecture we, in America, are indebted for about all that is popularly known of that beautiful art and science. As it was now vacation, I had an opportunity of seeing Oxford first, as it were, in scene, without the dramatis personæ; and no one is more capable than my kind host, of explaining the antiquarian and architectural glories of Oxford to a stranger. As he courteously gave me his valuable time, I made my primary rounds under his guidance.
As I came into Oxford, from Cuddesdon, I heard the bells of St. Mary’s in full peal, and experienced an exhilarating emotion that greatly heightened my impressions. After my arrival in the Turl—a name which indicates that the street was once a country-lane, guarded by a turn-stile—I took my second walk through the city, my first having been on the previous Sunday, passing from St. Ebbe’s to Wadham College, with the Bishop. Now, beginning with New College and the glories of William of Wykeham, I felt a new impulse of wonder and admiration, as if the half had not been told me. In vain does the pedant complain of the architecture here displaying the genius of that munificent founder, and tell us that it marks a decline from the elevation of the decorated period; for who can but see, in what is called decline, something much more like an elaborate adaptation of sacred art to academic purposes, exhibiting high invention, and a sense of the fitting and appropriate, which proves a taste truly refined, and a fancy rich and creative? So, at least, it strikes me; and the moral element is not less observable, the very stones seeming vital and instinct with the designer’s great soul and spirit. Thus the gateways, as has been well remarked, exhibit strength and utility, with little to advertise what is within; the domestic part is simple, and chaste and homelike; the hall bespeaks a generous hospitality, and suggests the social and civilizing character with which religion invests the table and the meal, and elevates it to a feast of reason; while, at last, the chapel is full of divine majesty, and commands abasement of self in the house of God, and at the gate of heaven. Wykeham was, for his day, a reformer, as really as Wyckliffe, and nothing is more certain than that the true Anglican alone has a right to glory in his achievements. They mark a period of contest with the papacy, every step of which contributed to the ultimate liberation of the Church of England from its Italian yoke, and they were perfected in that English spirit, against which the Pope was always at war, and which late apostates from our Nicene faith detest and anathematize as schism. True it is that we differ with Wykeham and Waynefleet in many items of opinion and practice, in which they were no wiser than their times; but they are one with us, historically, in the communion of the Church of England, in the maintenance of her individuality and independence, and in the confession of the Nicene Creed, as the authorized symbol of Christendom. These impressions, forced upon me within these walls, and growing on me every day that I spent in England, returned with ten-fold power after I had seen the Continent, and again beheld English Churches and colleges, and felt their essential antagonism to what is Italian and Tridentine, and their almost physical tendency towards the production of such a Church, in their ultimate result, as the Anglican Communion is at this day, and is likely to be in future. Let us depend upon it, and act upon it, as a fact in the providence and design of God, that the Church of England, from the first day she was planted until now, has been, as it were, “the Church in the wilderness;” retaining always a primitive and individual element, and preparing for eventual manifestation in the pure glory of the Bride, the great adversary of the harlot, with whose painted front and virago fury she now patiently contends.
Although the modern parts of the College are conspicuous from the gardens, I found in them a fascination which I can hardly account for or describe. The ancient city walls, with their bastions and defences, are still preserved as the boundaries of the premises, and possibly it is to them, with their embowering verdure and isolating effect, that one owes a feeling of enchanting seclusion and quietude. Here my trans-Atlantic eyes first beheld the loop-holes and embrasures of mediæval fortification; first grasped the idea of intramural siege, and bow-and-arrow fight! It struck me overwhelmingly with a sense of loss and mental injury, that I should have known only faintly, and from books, what thus the Oxford student receives in passive impressions of reality—the ennobling idea of our connections with the past, and its paternal relations to us. To see every day the walls on which one’s forefathers, ages ago, patrolled in armor, or from which they aimed the cross-bow; to walk and study and repose habitually under their shadow; to have always, in sport and in toil, in sorrow and in joy, such monuments of time and history about one: how ought it not to refine and mature the character; and make a man feel his place between two eternities; and inspire him to live well the short and evil day in which, if ever, what he does for futurity must be done quickly, and with might!