was like beholding the light of the first dawn arriving at Eden. And in the evening that accumulated gloom raised the whole question between silence and speech, and did not answer it. The song of the blackbird is heard, cushioned among the sleepy cooings of doves. And when they cease, how fine is the silence! When they revive, how fine is the song! For the silence seems to appropriate and not to destroy the song. The blackbird, too, seems to appropriate and make much of the silence when he sings. The long meditations of the gowned and ungowned therein are not of less account because the only tangible result is the perfect beheading of dandelions as they walk to and fro.
How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?
I only know that all we know comes from you,
And that you come from Eden on flying feet.
Is Eden far away, or do you hide
From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys
That run before the reaping-hook and lie
In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods
And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods,
More shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds?
Is Eden out of time and out of space?
And do you gather about us when pale light
Shining on water and fallen among leaves,
And winds blowing from flowers, and whirr of feathers,
And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart?
Not often can the most academic dreamer see Faunus among those trees or Daphne in the laurel again.
On the grass the shadows of the roof, and later, of a tree, make time an alluring toy. The shadow is cut in finer and sharper angles than the roofs make, in the rich, hazy, Oxford light.[Pg 428]
To walk round about the garden twice could not occupy an hour of the most tranquil or gouty human life, even if you stayed to see the toadflaxes and ferns in the wall, to note the shape of the trees, and admire how the changing sun patronises space after space of the college buildings. Yet no maze or boundless moor could give a greater pleasure of seclusion and security. Not in vain has it served many academic generations as a sweet and melodious ante-chamber of the unseen. For, as an old book grows the richer to the wise reader, for the porings of its dead owners in past years, so these trees and this lawn have been enriched. Their roots are deep in more than earth. Their crests traffic with more than the doves and the blue air. There is surely no other garden so fit to accompany the reading of Comus or the Æneid. They become domesticated in the heart amidst these propitious shades. But not many bring books under the trees; nor are they unwise who are contented to translate what silence says. The many-coloured undergraduate lounges there with another of his kind, and may perhaps encounter the shade of some “buck” or “smart” of old, who will set a stamp of antiquity on his glories. Choleric old—— walks there sometimes; but either a caterpillar falls, or the leaves turn over and unburden themselves of their rain; and he comes back, loudly thinking that, if a covered cloister had been in the place of the trees, he would not have lost a very ingenious thread of reflection about the greatest good of the greatest number. [Pg 430][Pg 429]And—— goes there after a college meeting, and
FELLOWS’ GARDEN, EXETER COLLEGE
On the extreme left of the picture is part of the two-storeyed Library of the College, built in 1856. Farther on is the south end of the lobby to the Divinity School (“Pig Market,” see other picture), at the base of which are some steps, leading to an earthen embankment overlooking Radcliffe Square.