perfume creeps over the grass, and makes the May blossom something elvish. I turn and look east. Almost at once, all these things are happily composed into one pleasant sense, and are but a frame to a tower and three spires of Oxford, like clouds—but the sky is suddenly cloudless.
I suppose that ivy has the same graceful ways on all old masonry, yet I have caught myself remembering, as if it were unique, that perfect ancient ivy that makes an arcade of green along the wall of Godstow nunnery. And in the same way, above all others I remember the pollard willows that lean this way and that along the Oxford streams—like prehistoric sculpture in winter, but in summer a green wave and full of voices. Never have I seen sunsets like those which make Wytham Wood and Marley Wood great purple clouds, and the clouds overhead more solid than they. How pleasant are Cherwell and Evenlode, and those angry little waters at Ferry Hinksey! When I see the rain a white cloud and Shotover Hill a grey cloud, I seem never before to have seen the sweetness of rain. October is nowhere so much itself as among the Hinksey elms, when the fallen leaves smell of tea (and who that loves tea and autumn will cast a stone?). The trees, whether they stand alone or in societies, are most perfect in autumn. Something in the soil or climate preserves their farewell hues as in a protracted sunset. Looking at them at nightfall, it is hard to believe that they have been amidst ten thousand sunsets and remained the same; for they ponder great matters, and not only in[Pg 494] the autumn, but in May, when the silence is startled by the gurgling laughter of the hen cuckoo. When spring comes into the land, I remember a mulberry that suspended its white blossom, among black boughs, over a shining lawn at the edge of the city; and the bells that in March or April seemed to be in league with spring, as we heard them from the fields. And how well a conversation would grow and blossom between Headington and Wheatley or Osney and Eaton! Some that loved not the country would flourish strangely in wisdom or folly as the roads rose or fell, or as the grey oak stems of Bagley Wood began to make a mist around us. The only incidents, in twenty miles, were the occasional sprints of one who was devoted to a liver, or the cometary passing of one on a bicycle that sang Le Roi d’Ivetot as if it were a psalm containing the whole duty of man. And how a book—even a “schools” book—taken on the river or the hills, would yield a great sweetness to alternate handlings and laughter of several companions; or, if it were a dull book, might be made to yield more than its author ever meant. I have ever thought that the churchyard with a broken cross at Hinksey, and the willows below and the elms above, if one takes George Herbert there, is a better argument for the Church than Jewel and Chilling worth, if the old yew had not seemed the priest of some old superstition still powerful.
No one can walk much in the Oxford country without becoming a Pantheist. The influence of the city, the memories, the books he is fresh from, help the indolent[Pg 496][Pg 495]
OXFORD FROM HEADINGTON HILL
The elm trees of the “Grove” of Magdalen College show to the extreme left of the picture. The buildings of the College do not appear.
To the right of the “Grove” are the two spires of the Cathedral and the University Church of St. Mary, with the Radcliffe dome and the “Schools” tower farther on.
The view is looking west, at sunset in corn harvest.