BYRON'S POOL
CAMBRIDGE
To the sympathetic beholder one of the most potent charms of England lies in the singular diversity of its landscape. To him each district makes its special, its peculiar appeal. He is sensible everywhere of a real, if intangible, genius loci; and he is prone to seek the effect of some such spirit as well in the history of communities and bodies politic as in the lives of individuals. For him, then, there must needs be something of truth in the idea that much of the destinies of Oxford and Cambridge lay written upon the land at their gates. From the hills above Oxford a man may see the whole city at his feet. Generations of men have so seen it, and have so regarded it, subjectively—as a whole. At sundown, when the varied shape of tower and dome merge in a common outline, this impression of unity becomes unforgetably intensified; and but few, probably, of those who have found there the place of their education, will have left it without a sense of having shared in some common purpose. It has ever seemed the aim of Oxford to foster uniformity; of Cambridge, however unconsciously, to encourage the opposite in thought and manners. The sympathies which unite men of a Cambridge education are not therefore less strong, but they are subtler and less capable of expression in a phrase.
Cambridge is no city of spires. She lies belted with woods in the midst of a wide plain. To south, to west, to east stretches a lowland landscape, delicately moulded, rich in pasture and corn-bearing fields. Northwards a man need ride but a few miles across the fens to hear the bells of Ely, or at twilight to see the lantern of that ancient church preserve its solitary vision of the sun. Through this broad tract of country, whose every detail is typical of all which is most beautiful in the Eastern Midlands, winds that gentlest of English rivers, the Cam. Above Cambridge, it still bears its ancient name of Granta; at Ely it is the Ouse. The scenery along its upper reaches, though small in scale, is of singular merit to eyes which are not weary of "Nature's old felicities". Near Grantchester, a lock now marks an ancient bifurcation of the river, and here the stream widens to form a deep sequestered pool, shaded by a veritable arena of tall trees. Poet as well as peasant must often have bathed here and have made it a place of meditation. It was a favourite spot with Byron, and it is still called after him.
Passing from the countryside to within the boundaries of the University itself, nothing, perhaps, will seem more remarkable to the curious observer than the absence of that hard-featured grandeur with which the architecture of the Middle Ages was so deeply impressed. Cambridge goes back eight centuries; but there remains little to remind us of those many vicissitudes of mediæval life from which neither of the Universities emerged unscathed; for with the disappearance of Feudalism, the advent of the New Learning, and the breakdown of Monasticism, Cambridge assumed a richer dress, and the fine apparel of those days becomes her still. From that string of Tudor palaces whose broad lawns and well-nurtured gardens mark the lazy passage of the Cam, to those more distant Colleges of Jesus and Emmanuel, a grave tranquillity pervades the whole. This sense of peace and of contentment, so precious to the individual mind, seems largely due to that gracious domesticity which the Tudor architect so well knew how to impart even to the meanest of his college buildings. But to those later architects who practised here, while architecture was still an art in England, is owing that conscious, studied stateliness we now prize. The genius of Wren, which at Oxford in his tower of Christ Church with inimitable propriety seized upon and revivified for his purpose the Gothic style of architecture, as easily and as properly adapted itself to the more reticent temper of this University. The examples of his skill which may be seen at Pembroke and Emmanuel; the bridge at St. John's, built by his pupil Hawksmoor apparently from his designs; above all his great Library at Trinity, remain to show with what appreciation he met the contemplative character of the Cambridge mind, with what zest he lent his art to the commemoration of her material prosperity.