The entrance gateway to the College and a portion of Tom Tower appear in the background.
almost certainly one of the remarkable efforts of imagination which are frequently devoted to that famous city and its inhabitants. The patience of the undergraduate is extreme. It is extended to tradesmen and to the sounds of the Salvation Army. He greets bimetallists with tenderness, teetotallers with awe, and vegetarians with a kind of rapture, tempered by a rare spurt of scientific inquiry. If he makes an exception against sentimentalism, he relents in favour of that place, “so late their happy seat,” when he goes down. Mr. Belloc has put that retrospection classically:—
The wealth of youth, we spent it well
And decently, as very few can.
And is it lost? I cannot tell,
And what is more, I doubt if you can....
They say that in the unchanging place,
Where all we loved is always dear,
We meet our morning face to face,
And find at last our twentieth year....
They say (and I am glad they say)
It is so; and it may be so:
It may be just the other way;
I cannot tell. But this I know:
From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.
. . . . . . . . . .
But something dwindles, oh! my peers,
And something cheats the heart and passes,
And Tom that meant to shake the years
Has come to merely rattling glasses.[Pg 262]
And He, the Father of the Flock,
Is keeping Burmesans in order,
An exile on a lonely rock,
That overlooks the Chinese border.
And one (myself I mean—no less),
Ah! will Posterity believe it—
Not only don’t deserve success,
But hasn’t managed to achieve it.