memoried hours that followed. When sleep caught him at last, with what happiness and pomp he walked down St. Aldate’s and along Blue Boar Street and Merton Street, and came suddenly upon Wren’s domed gate at Queen’s! or paused in St. Mary’s porches, or found the inmost green sanctuary of Wadham Gardens!
Once he dreamed that on a Sunday he preached from the little outdoor pulpit at Magdalen, where he mounted by some artifice of sleep’s. The chamber windows and quadrangles were full. His voice rose and linked to him the crowd outside in High Street. All remained silent, even when it was known that the hieroglyphics were skipping from their perches in the cloister and carrying off large numbers, no one knew whither. Those that were spared—and his voice rose ever higher, and expanded like the column and fans of masonry at Christ Church—were stripped of their waistcoats and ties and all their luxuries and dignities. Their hair was shaved: presently they were all cowled, and with a great shout hailed him Chancellor. He floated down from the pulpit and led them down the High, evicting the pampered tradespeople and fettering all parasites. Singing a charging hymn, they marched in procession to St. Mary’s, and thence to a feast at Christ Church hall; when he awoke with the din of revelry.
Sometimes, in his dreams, he saw enacted the Greek tragedies, to the accompaniment of the organs of New College and the Cathedral.
Now that he knew his plays by heart, he came oftener[Pg 306] to Oxford, and gained the freedom of the Bodleian. Every day he came, bringing his own books to fill the interval before the library books arrived, although for the most part he stared at the gilt inscriptions outside his alcove window, or at the trees and roofs farther off. When he was hidden among the expected volumes he read but feverishly. He put questions to himself in the style of the schoolmen, and pondered “whether the music of the spheres be verse or prose.” He tingled all over with the learned air, and was intoxicated by the dust of a little-used book. The brown spray that fell from a volume on the shelf before him was sweeter than the south wind. Week after week obscured his aims. The only moments of his old chanting joy came to him in his still undiluted expectations, when he came in sight of the city—
O fortunati quorum jam mœnia surgunt!—
and at night, while the river shone like an infinite train let fall from the shoulders of the city.
He sold his books in Little Clarendon Street, and whenever he wished to read, there he found them and others ready. Most of his time passed in the corner of an inn, where he sat at a hole in the dark window as at a hagioscope, and with heavy eyelids watched the University men. And it was possible to earn a living by selling the Star for a penny, night after night, and to have the felicity of dying in Oxford.[Pg 308][Pg 307]
A “STUDY” IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY