On the right stand those grotesque thermes partly surrounding and forming an entrance to the enclosure of the Sheldonian Theatre, the old Ashmolean, and the Schools.
They are a quaint and conspicuous feature in Broad Street.
Above them towers the Clarendon Building, with its worn and richly coloured surface, the columns of the portico relieved against the sky. A portion of the Indian Museum appears in the centre of the picture, the old houses forming picturesque foreground objects to the left.
melancholy repose. The owls were silent. The nightingales joined their songs to the larks’. And I went out and walked and remembered his epitaph—Vita dulcis, sed dulcior mors—and another July day, when Philip Amberley was alive.
How he would walk! with what an air, an effluence, humble, and of consequence withal! Half the village dallied among their flowers or beehives to see him going. His long staff was held a foot from the upper end, which almost entered his beard. He bore it, not airily with twirling and fantastic motion, as our younger generation likes to do, but solemnly, making it work, and leaning on it as if it were a sceptre, a pillar, a younger brother. His eyes appeared to study the ground; yet indeed all that was to be seen and much that is commonly invisible lay within their sway. It was said he kept eyes in his pockets. His shanks were of the extreme tenuity that seems no more capable of weariness than of being diminished. Returning or setting forth, especially when seen against the sky at sunset or dawn, he was a portent rather than a man. His person was an emblem of human warfaring on earth—a hieroglyph—a monument. His movements were of epic significance. His beard did not merely wag; it transacted great matters. In setting out he himself said he never contemplated return; it was unnecessary; at most it was one of several possibilities. Yet had he a big laugh that came from his beard like a bell from a grey tower. He would even sing as he walked, and was the sole appreciator of his own rendering[Pg 228] of “The All Souls’ Mallard,” in a broken, grim baritone.
All day we walked along an ancient Oxfordshire road. It was the most roundabout and kindly way towards our end, and so disguised our purpose that we forgot it. The road curved not merely as a highway does. Demurring, nicely distinguishing between good and better, rashly advancing straight, coyly meandering, it had fallen in love with its own foibles, and its progress was not to be measured by miles. At one loop (where the four arms of a battered signpost all pointed to—nowhere) the first man who trod this way must have paused to think, or not to think, and have lost all aim save perambulation. So it stole through the land without arresting the domesticities of the quiet hills. Often it was not shut out from the fields by hedge or fence or bank. For some leagues it became a footpath—its second childhood—“as though a rose should shut and be a bud again”—with grass and flowers unavoidable under foot and floating briers and hops overhead. In places the hedges had united and unmade the road. From every part of it some church could be seen: Philip would sometimes enter in, having some faith in the efficacy of reverence offered by stealth on these uncanonical holy days. On our way he sometimes paused, where bees made a wise hum in glowing gardens; or where the corn-shocks looked like groups of women covered by their yellow hair, as the sun ascended; or where the eye slumbered, and yet not senselessly or in vain, amidst a rich undistinguished[Pg 229] landscape, made unreal and remote by mist; and he would whisper an oath or a line of Theocritus or a self-tormenting speech—“Six hundred years ago perhaps one of my name passed along this road. Oh! for one hour of his joy as he spied his inn, or carved a cross in the church of St. John, or kissed the milkmaid at yonder gateway. Or would that I could taste his grief, even; his fresh and lively grief, I think, had something in it which my pale soul is sick for. For me the present is made of the future and the past. But he—perhaps—he could say, ‘Here am I with a can of mead and a fatigue that will do honour to my lavendered sheets; Ave Maria! here’s to you all!’” Yet Philip’s mood was not seldom as clear and simple as that.
At the inn—a classic inn to Oxford scholars—while the wind was purring in a yew tree, he put all his gloomier fancies in a tankard, where they were transmuted by a lambent ale and the “flaming ramparts” of that small world. The landlord was unloading a dray. As it is with men and clothes, remarked Philip, so with ale; the one grace of new ale is that it will one day be old. “May I,” he said, “in some world or another, be at least as old as this tankard, in the course of time: if I deserve it, as old as this inn: if I can, as old as these hills, with their whiskers of yew. Or, so long as I am not solitary, may I be as old as the sun, which alone of all visible things has obviously reached a fine old age!” He told me that his only valued dream was of an immemorial man, seated on a star near[Pg 230] the zenith; and his beard’s point swept the hilltops, while with one hand he raised a goblet as large as the dome of the Radcliffe to his lips, and with the other stroked his beard and caused golden coins to flow in cascades into the countless hands of those underneath; and in a melodious bass he said continually, “It is well.”