“Oxford ... must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about grey, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,—lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,—spires, towers, and turrets, each with its history and legend,—dimly magnificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest gloom,—vast college halls, high-windowed, oaken-panelled, and hung around with portraits of the men in every age whom the University has nurtured to be illustrious,—long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the wisdom and learned folly of all time is shelved,—kitchens (we throw in this feature by way of ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford without its beef and beer) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a hundred joints at once,—and cavernous[Pg 516] cellars, where rows of piled-up hogsheads seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is the true milk of Alma Mater: make all these things vivid in your dream, and you will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result to represent even the merest outside of Oxford.”—Hawthorne.
“Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
There are our young barbarians, all at play!
And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! whose example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all so prone, that bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend’s highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of[Pg 517] sight behind him—the bondage of Was uns alle bändigt, DAS GEMEINE! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?”
Matthew Arnold.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
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A COMPANION VOLUME TO ‘OXFORD’ IN MESSRS. BLACK’S SERIES OF BEAUTIFUL BOOKS