We now return to our exploration of "The High," whose magnificence of outline become more and more apparent as one walks eastwards. It was a poet bred at Cambridge, no less a poet than Wordsworth, whom the manifold charm of Oxford tempted "to slight his own beloved Cam"; and he it is who has written the most quotable description of "The High" in brief. "The streamlike windings of that glorious street," he writes: and indeed its curve suggests nothing so much as the majestic bend of some noble river. We may cite, too, Sir Walter Scott's testimony, who claimed that the High Street of Edinburgh is the most magnificent in Great Britain, except the High Street of Oxford. It is not at all difficult to assent to this opinion. As the view gradually unfolds itself, we have on our left successively the new front of Brasenose, St. Mary's, All Souls, Queen's, and Magdalen; on our right the long, dark front of University, and many old dwelling-houses, whose architecture does not shame their situation. Looking backward for a moment at Queen's College (perhaps when the west is rosy, as in Mr. Matthison's drawing), one sees substantially the same view which delighted Wordsworth in 1820; and we, if we are wise, shall take as much delight in it as he. Many thousand times since then has the sun set behind the spires of St. Mary's and All Saints, but the unaltered prospect obliterates the intervening years, and we are at one with the great poet in his admiration.
Contrast is always pleasant, and one may reach Broad Street (which certainly must not be neglected) by several thoroughfares totally unlike "The High." We may traverse Long Wall Street, with Magdalen Grove on our right, a pleasance hidden from the wayfarer by a high wall, but visible to such as lodge in upper rooms on the other side of the way; thence along Holywell Street, with its queer medley of old houses, many of them pleasing to the eye. Or, still greater contrast, we may go by Queen's and New College Lanes, with their rectangular turns and severe masonry on either side. Or, again, we may go through the Radcliffe square with its massive buildings on every hand—the Radcliffe dome in the centre, girt about with St. Mary's, Brasenose, All Souls, and the Old Schools. In any case we find ourselves, at the last, in Broad Street.
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It is a wide and quiet street, with comparatively little traffic, a street dear to meditation. Some such suggestion is conveyed by Mr. Matthison's sketch. He has not given us here the fronts of Balliol, Trinity, or Exeter,—views of the first two will be found later on,—but just the old houses (the one in dark relief is Kettell Hall, built by a President of Trinity in the seventeenth century) asleep in the sunshine, with the Sheldonian on the right, whose guardian figure-heads, traditionally said to represent the twelve Cæsars, seem by the expression of their stony countenances to be thinking hard of nothing in particular. At the other end of Broad Street, marked by a flat cross in the roadway, is the spot where tradition says the martyrs suffered for their faith.