spring in Bagley Woods, when the meadows are carpeted with purple and gold:
“The frail, white-leaved anemony,
Dark blue-bells drenched with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with spotted leaves;”
in June, in Eights’ Week, when the University is bravely ploughing its way through a storm of gaiety and athleticism into the inevitable maelstrom of examinations, when the streets are crowded with cricketers, oarsmen, and their sisters, when the Schools and College quads are transformed into ball-rooms and many a boat lingers onward dreamily in the golden light of the setting sun beneath the willows that fringe the Cherwell—at these times Oxford seems an enchanted city, a land where it is always afternoon. But you will come to know her best, and to love her perhaps more dearly, if you choose the later summer months, the Long Vacation. Then all the rich meadow-lands that surround her are most tranquil, green and mellow, and seem to reflect the peace of the ancient city, freed for a while from the turmoil of University life. Then perhaps you will best realise the two-sided character of this Janus-City. For there are two Oxfords in one, as our story will show, upon the banks of the Isis—a great county town besides a great University. And as to the mood in which you shall visit her, who shall dictate a mood in a place so various? Something of the emotion that Wordsworth felt may be yours:
“I could not print
Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps
Of generations of illustrious men
Unmoved. I could not always pass
Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that inclosure old,
That garden of great intellects, undisturbed;”
or something of the charming fancifulness of Charles Lamb which may lead you to play the student, or fetch up past opportunities, and so “pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.” Or it may please you best to spend not all your time among the bricks and stone and mortar, ever-changing as they are in hue and aspect, or amid the College groves and gardens, rich as is their beauty, perfect as is their repose. The glories of the surrounding country may tempt you most. You may wander many happy miles through cool green country, full of dark-leaved elms and furzy dingles, with the calm, bright river ever peeping at you through gaps in woods and hedges, to Godstow, where Rosamund Clifford lived and died; to Cumnor, the warm green-muffled Cumnor Hills, and those oaks that grow thereby, on which the eyes of Amy Robsart may have rested. You may choose to track the shy Thames shore
“through the Wytham flats,
Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among,
And darting swallows and light water-gnats—”
and, with the poet, learn to know the Fyfield tree, the wood which hides the daffodil:
“What white, what purple fritillaries
The grassy harvest of the river-fields,
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,
And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries.”