The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories

by Logan Pearsall Smith

"Heraldry, musick, and painting did so much crowd upon him, that he could not avoid them, and could never give a reason why he should delight in those studies more than in others, so prevalent was nature." "My pen cannot enough describe," he writes in his enthusiasm, when he first read Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, "how A. Wood's tender affections and insatiable desire of knowledge were ravish'd and melted down by the reading of that book. What by music and rare books that he found in the public library, his life at this time and after was a perfect Elysium."

"Wood often went for long, solitary walks, collecting arms and monumental inscriptions from the churches, and visiting all the ruined religious Houses and old halls in the country about Oxford. He describes in his diary how, as he returned towards Oxford in the evening, 'after he had taken his rambles about the country to collect monuments,' he would hear the bells of Merton, his own College, ringing clearly in the distance."

"Wood had small love for the Puritans," Sutton wrote, "who in his lifetime were so long in power; and in his record of contemporary events, sudden deaths, and alleged appearances of the devil, he more than once mentions their destruction of antiquities, their contempt for the Fathers and Schoolmen, and hatred of all authority, and 'everything that smelt of an Academy, never rejoicing more than when he could trample on the gowne, and bring humane learning and arts into disgrace.'"

"Then came the Restoration, and almost the last event that Wood records is the revival of Catholicism under James II. Wood himself was suspected of being a Papist; his writings had made him enemies, and before he died he was expelled from the University, and his book burned by order of the Vice-Chancellor's Court."

"And yet, on the whole, his life was a happy one," Sutton said, writing, it was plain, with a certain envy for the tranquil occupations and lettered tastes of the old Oxford antiquary.

XVII.

The next two letters that Foley found (and they were the last) were dated in the Long Vacation, nearly a year later. Either Sutton had not written again for some time, or Foley had lost the letters. It was the American's third summer in England; as before, he had stayed in Oxford. He described the quiet afternoons he spent in the College garden; how he seemed to be alone with Oxford and the past, and how even the city noises, which came in over the walls—the rattle of carts, the shrill, faint voices of newsboys, crying the world's events—only added a deeper hush to the stillness and solitude within, the sunlight on the grass, the shadows of the trees.

He remembered how homesick he had been the first summer he had spent in Oxford, and how he had longed to go back. But now that his work was almost finished, and he was soon to go to America, he could not help admitting that he shrank a little from it—felt a certain reluctance, after all. He would watch, as he had watched before, the tourists who now and then came into the quiet garden. Then he had enjoyed seeing them, and wished he could talk to them; but now!...

And one day some people whom he had known in Indiana came in. He spoke to them, showed them about, and tried to be friendly, and yet they seemed so far away somehow! He hated himself for it, and tried to believe that it was all the fault of Oxford and its fastidious standards; he had let himself be too much influenced, but when he got back to Parnassus again, he hoped he should see things as he used to see them, and feel the same towards the Slocums and all his old friends.

But in the last letter, "It will never be the same now," Sutton had written; "I have come too far and stayed too long. At first I was always thinking of Parnassus City; I would dream of it at night, and wake in the morning to wonder at the strangeness of my dim little windows and the voices of the rooks outside. But then it began to fade, and gradually everything changed. And yet, poor fool that I was, all the time I tried to think that I was preparing myself to go back. Of course I shall go back; if I can't be a Minister, I can still teach in their university, perhaps—I must do something to help them, it would be treachery if I did not. But my heart will be far away from it all, I know. I try to think of the excellent people there, and how fatally kind they have been to me; but when I shut my eyes, I can see nothing but the ugly church, the wooden 'university,' and a great sun-baked street, with sparse houses and dusty trees straggling off on the prairie. How can I ever live there now? And yet, if I had never come away, I might have been happy. Why did they send me to Oxford, I wonder. Yet was it not my fate? It seems to me that I must have come here sometime!"