Edward Thomas

“ When spring comes into the land, I remember a mulberry that suspended its white blossom, among black boughs, over a shining lawn at the edge of the city; and the bells that in March or April seemed to be in league with spring, as we heard them from the fields. And how well a conversation would grow and blossom between Headington and Wheatley or Osney and Eaton! Some that loved not the country would flourish strangely in wisdom or folly as the roads rose or fell, or as the grey oak stems of Bagley Wood began to make a mist around us. ”

“ How pleasant are Cherwell and Evenlode, and those angry little waters at Ferry Hinksey! When I see the rain a white cloud and Shotover Hill a grey cloud, I seem never before to have seen the sweetness of rain. October is nowhere so much itself as among the Hinksey elms, when the fallen leaves smell of tea (and who that loves tea and autumn will cast a stone?) . The trees, whether they stand alone or in societies, are most perfect in autumn. Something in the soil or climate preserves their farewell hues as in a protracted sunset. ”

“ No garden is so fortunate in retaining its splendour when summer brusquely departs, or so rich in the idiom of green leaves when the dewy charities of the south wind are at last accepted. None so happily assists the music and laughter and lamps of some festivity. And when in February the heavy rain bubbles at the foot of the trees, and spins a shifting veil about their height and over the grass, it seems to reveal more than it conceals. The loneliness of the place becomes intense, as if one were hidden far back in time, and one’s self an anachronism. ”

“ At such times the folded gloom gives up the tale of the past most willingly.
The casual stranger sees little in the garden but neatness and repose. He may notice how luckily the few trees occur, and what warmth the shrubbery bestows, when they are black with rain and the crocus petals are spilt in silence. In a little while he may be privileged to learn what a great space for the eye, and especially for the imagination, the unknown gardener has contrived out of a few roods of high-walled grass. ”

“ And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! ”

“ The tutors here, like the masters at school, he regards as men who turn a handle and work up more or less good material into scholars, as a butcher makes sausages, all exactly alike to the eye, out of a mysterious heap. At first he is in great awe of a fellow, and wears his scholar’s gown at its utmost length, and as proudly as star and riband—he will hardly take it off in the severe quarter of an hour in which he permits himself to drink coffee and eat anchovy toast after dinner ”

“ 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. ”

“ A man might be seen, forgetful of the world, nursing his faculties from soup to ice, in the gestation of an epigram. Thus it tended to cast a shadow over conversation, and to replace the genial, slow, and whist-like alternations of good talk with the sudden follies of snap or the violences of bridge. Breakfast itself was sometimes made the occasion of duels, with a thrust and parry not oftener than twice in a course. A man would come melancholy to luncheon because he had not hit upon a good thing in the lecture which preceded it. ”

“ For me, when the first splendour of the city in my imagination has somewhat grown dim, I see in the midst and on high, a room, little wider than the thickness of its walls, which were part stone, part books; for the books fitted naturally into the room, leaving spaces only for a bust of Plato, a portrait of Sir Thomas Browne, a decanter, and a window commanding sky and clouds and stars above an horizon of many towers. ”

“ In Oxford nothing is the creation of one man or of one year. Every college and church and garden is the work of centuries of men and time. Many a stone reveals an octave of colour that is the composition of a long age. The founder of a college laid his plans; in part, perhaps he fixed them in stone. His successors continued the work, and without haste, without contempt of the future or ignorance of the past, helped the building to ascend unto complete beauty by means of its old and imperfect selves. ”

“ It has neither the richness of that nor the frivolity of tea. [Pg 364] The breakfast talker seems to depend very little on memory. He remembers fewer stories, less of the book he read on the night before, than at a later meal. He is thrown more entirely upon the resources of his own fantasy. The experience of sleep still lies like a great water between him and yesterday. In the cold, young, golden light, among the grey stones of the quadrangle, the brain, too, rejoices in its own life, and forgets to look before and after. Habit is weaker. ”

“ They form a trail from the villages, upon wall after wall, into Ship Street and Queen’s Lane, by which the country may be traced. In the same way, the city may be said to steal out into the fields. Not only do we read the epitaph of a forgotten fellow in a quiet church, and mark a resemblance to Merton or Lincoln in the windows of an old house in North Hinksey Street, but the beauty of the windy Shotover plateau, with its slopes of hyacinth and furze, and the elmy hills of Cumnor and Radbrook, are haunted and peopled by visions of the distant spires. ”

“ No one is so married to his surroundings as he, and while he appears to many to be shaped by them—beautiful or grotesque—as an animal in a shell; to a few he appears also to shape them, so that Oxford in his company is a new thing, as if it were the highest, last creation of the modern mind. He does not acquiesce in the limp mediævalism of the rest, but recreates the Middle Ages for himself, finding new humanities in the sculptures, and beauties in the perspective, strange sympathies between the monkish work and the voices and faces of those who sit amidst it. ”

“ There is a beautiful, sloping acre, not far from Oxford, which a number of great elms divide into aisles and nave, while at one end a curving hawthorn and maple hedge completes them with an apse. Towards Oxford, the space is almost shut in by remote elms. On one side I hear the soft and sibilant fall of soaking grass before the scythe. The rain and sun alternating are like two lovers in dialogue; the rain smiles from the hills when the sun shines, and the sun also while the rain is falling. ”

“ But in the darkness they slip away. For all the candles are out, and there is a bonfire making red weals upon the grey walls; then another dance; and a hundred times, “Auld lang syne,” until the college is quiet, and but rarely a light is seen through curtains and over battlements: and the long Oxford night begins. Large reponens, we build up the fire. If it be autumn, we will hardly permit it ever to go out, thus consoling ourselves for the transitory glow of the sun, and fantastically handing on the sunsets of many summers and the dawns of many springs, in that constant flame. ”

“ Often I saw a clean-limbed beech, pale and slender, yet firm in its loftiness, that shook delicately arched branches at the top, and below held out an arm on which a form of schoolboys might have sat,—rising out of fine grass and printing its perfect outlines on the sky,—and I could fancy it enjoyed a life of pleasure that was health, beauty that was strength, thought that was repose. ”

“ A don will not hesitate to make the worst joke in a strong and cheerful voice in the bookseller’s shop, when it is full of clever freshmen.
Yonder they go, the worldly and the unworldly, the rich and poor, high and low, proving that Oxford is one of the most democratic places in Europe. The lax discipline that broadens the horizon of the inexpert stranger is probably neither unwise nor unpremeditated. It is certainly not inconsistent with the genius of a city whose very stones may be supposed to have acquired an educative faculty, and a sweet presence that is not to be put by. ”

“ The noise of rattles, bells, pistols, whistles, bagpipes, frying-pans, and shouts can be heard in all the colleges and in the fields at Marston and Hinksey, where it has a kind of melody. Close at hand, it has a charm for the experienced tympanum: for in the cries of the victorious colleges the joy of victory is too great to allow of any discordant crow of mere triumph; the cries of those about to be beaten are too determined to have in them anything of hate. ”

“ At sunset or at dawn the city’s place in the world, as a beautiful thing, is clearest. Few cities look other than sad at those hours; many, unless hid in their own smoke, look cheap. Oxford becomes part of the magic of sunset and dawn,—is, as it were, gathered into the bosom of the power that is abroad. Yet, if it is one with the hills and the clouds and the silence, the human dignity of the place is also significant. The work of the ancient architect conspires with that of the sunset and of long, pregnant tracts of time ”

“ One who is bound to be a fellow starts on “the æsthetic value of dons.” One who has never left England offers a suggestive remark on Swiss scenery or the effect of palms against a sunrise in the Pacific. The transitions are indescribably rapid; yet the link of merely an epigram or a laugh, or possibly the very sense of contrast and incongruity, makes the whole run on as some fine hedge of maple, hawthorn, holly, elm, beech, and wild cherry runs on, and is fine and nothing else, except to a botanist. The talk is a play in five acts: each man is in turn a chorus. ”

“ One says that the garden is partly a confessor and partly an aunt. Above all, it is the resort of those who are about to leave Oxford for ever; and under its influence those who have forgotten all their ambitions, and those who are beginning to remember them, meet on some June or October afternoon, to decide that it has been worth while; and between the trees the college has a half-domestic, half-monastic air; all else is quite shut out, except where, like a curve of smoke, a dome rises, and the wraith of a spire among the clouds. ”

“ Sometimes thou art young to my eyes because thy children are always young, and for a little while it was a journey to youth itself to visit thee. More often, not only art thou old and austere, but thy fresh and youthful children seem to have learned austerity and the ways of age, for love of thee, graciously apparelling their youth,—so that I have met old Lyly in Holywell, and Johnson at the Little Clarendon Street bookshop, and Newman by Iffley rose-window,—with their age taken away, by virtue of a mellower light upon thy lawns and a mellower shade under thy towers, than other cities. ”

“ There a man might read, and comfort himself according to his means, and finally at night stamp up and down a passage, to warm his feet, before going to sleep in a crowded bed-chamber. On any day there was a chance that some splendid man, coming a little in the rear of his fame, would arrive in Oxford, and lecture or read a book. Should kings, or priests, or rude citizens interfere, the scholar could rusticate voluntarily—as he sometimes did—at Stamford, or Reading, or Maidstone, or Cambridge, and there, as best he might, by study and self-denial, as by a sacrament, recreate the University. ”

“ Then he borrows his old dignified look of indolence in the sultry schools, while he writes hard, and secures a second class by means of a legible handwriting, clear style, and amusing irrelevance. He goes down, alone, still with a fascinating tongue, desperate, and yet careless of success, ready to do anything so long as he can escape comfortable and conventional persons, and quite unable to be anything conspicuous, but a man who has been to the garden of the Hesperides and brought back apples that he alone can make appear to be golden in his rare moments of health. ”

“ He cannot speak to a dog in his own dialect, and understands Greek better than the language of a falconer. He has been used to a dark room, and dark clothes, and his eyes dazzle at a satin doublet. The hermitage of his study makes him somewhat uncouth in the world, and men make him worse by staring on him. Thus he is silly and ridiculous, and it continues with him for some quarter of a year, out of the University. But practise him a little in men, and brush him over with good company, and he shall outbalance those glisterers as much as a solid substance does a feather, or gold gold lace. ”

“ The merry breakfaster finds that a turn among the trees will add the button-hole to his complacency. The grave young scholar, with his gown almost to his heels, and the older one whose gown and cap resemble nothing that is worn by any save a tramp, meet there on summer evenings. The freshman gives the highest colour and purest atmosphere to his prophetic imaginings when he walks there first. ”

“ A man is apt to feel on first entering Oxford, and still more on leaving it, that the beautiful city is unfortunate in having but mortal minds to teach. There is a keen and sometimes pathetic sense of a great music which one cannot wholly follow, a light unapprehended, a wisdom not realised. Yet much is to be guessed at or privily understood, when we behold St. Mary’s spire, marvellously attended, and crowned, when the night is one sapphire, by Cassiopeia. ”

“ Rome has been called the ‘Sacred City’—might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it weaves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the ‘hill of ages,’ and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, ‘with glistening spires and pinnacles adorned,’ that shine with an eternal light as with the lustre of setting suns ”

“ College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring, expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are average men, with Oxford variations. ”

“ The brow of Jupiter—of Plato—of Augustus—was a hill of majesty equal with Olympus. The history of old sculpture is an Ave! to the brow. Now the soul has descended to the eyes. In politics, war, literature, above all in finance, victory is with the eyes. The old man had the godlike span of curving bone; but his eyes slept. It was his good fortune and Oxford’s honour that he ruled an Oxford college. ”

“ In which the frantic World does burn and sweat!—
Let any one who has laughed at Oxford discipline, or criticised her system of education, go there in the morning early and be abased before the solemnity of that square lawn; and should he be left with a desire to explain anything, let him take up his abode with the stony mysterious beasts gathered around that lawn. I like that grass amidst the cloisters because it is truly common. No one, I hope and believe, except a gardener, an emblem, is permitted to walk thereon. ”

“ It was an age of great, unpopular men who came and went suddenly and obscurely in Oxford, like the first lecturers of the twelfth century. They were divinely inflated with the beauty of Greek—a language always more strange and exotic and fascinating to Englishmen than Latin—and with admiration of the restorers of that beauty, Chrysoloras, Chalcondila, Politian. Grocyn, a Magdalen man, fresh from Italy, taught Greek in the hall of Exeter. ”

“ And certainly in a city that loves to light bonfires, and is never more herself than when she is welcoming a guest, enthusiasm is astonishingly well concealed. It may be detected occasionally among gentlemen who are conducting East-Enders from quadrangle to quadrangle, or among those who like the ground-ivy beer at Lincoln College on Ascension Day, or among those who salute financiers and others in the act of becoming Doctors of Civil Law at the Encænia. ”

“ He finds himself marvelling that one who was merely a gentleman in London can be interesting in Long Wall Street or on the Cherwell. The superb, expensive young man who thinks that there is “practically nobody in Oxford”—the poor, soiled scholar—the exuberant, crimson-lipped athlete, whose stride is a challenge, his voice a trumpet call—the lean and larded æsthete, busily engaged upon the quaint designs of oriental life,—all discover some point in common when they are seen together in the Schools, or on the riverside. ”

“ William of Waynfleet commanded that Magdalen College should be built over against the oak that fell after six hundred years of life a century ago. Sir Thomas White was “warned in a dream” to build a college at a place where there stood a triple elm tree. Hence arose St. John’s College. Two hundred years ago the tree was known to exist, and there is ground for the pious belief that a scion still flourishes there.
Nowhere is green so wonderful as at Magdalen or Trinity. But their sweetness is no more than the highest expression of the privacy of Oxford. ”

“ He is the corrector of all new abuses and the defender of old, and through his father, a college butler and long since dead, he has the times of Trafalgar fresh in his mind, with imposing third-hand memories of the days when Oxford was Jacobite. The subtle distinguishing marks of all the colleges, as far as concerns fashions of morals and manners, scholarship and sport, he knows by heart, and professes such an experienced acquaintance with like matters that in the High or by the Long Bridges he knows at sight a “Greats” man or a “Stinks” man or a mathematician ”

“ He establishes a despotism for the good of the college. He is willing to take the fellows into partnership, makes advances, and, when coyly repulsed, has his sense of importance increased by the knowledge that an opposition exists. His splendour is marred only by the stranger, who mistakes his brass-buttoned blazer for a livery, and finds his pomposity well worthy of such fine old quadrangles,—and requests him with a smile and half a sovereign to exhibit the chapel and the hall, and “tell me who are the swells”!
He walks about Oxford with a beautiful satisfaction. ”

“ But there is many a true thing said at tea in Oxford. The hours from four to seven are nothing if not critical. It is an irresponsible, frivolous time, and an interregnum between the tyranny of exercise and the tyranny of food. Nothing is now commended; yet nothing is envied. I suspect that some of the causes of the University love of parody might be found by an investigator in the Oxford tea. Over his crumpet or “slow poison” the undergraduate who is no wiser than he should be legislates for the world, settles even higher matters, and smilingly accepts a viceroyalty from Providence. ”

“ For Oxford, the fifteenth century was an age of libraries and books. Looking back upon it, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester seems its patron saint,—donor of books to the Benedictines who lived on the site of Worcester College, and to the University,—harbinger of the Bodleian. We can still catch the savour of the old libraries at Merton where the light coloured by painted glass used to inlay the gloom under the wooden roof, or behind the quiet latticed windows above the cloisters at Christ Church. ”

“ Isis babbles of the Muse, its waters are from the springs of Helicon, its Christ Church meadows, classic, Elysian fields!—We could pass our lives in Oxford without having or wanting any other idea—that of the place is enough. We imbibe the air of thought; we stand in the presence of learning. ”

“ Now he is never by himself. Those with whom he has no sympathies like him because he happens to know Pantagruel and a few books such as some undergraduates keep between false covers. His room is fragrant with unseasonable flowers, with the perfume of burning juniper, burning cassia, and cedar, and sweet oils. What if the honourable ghosts of Oxford frown upon his strange devotions? He is at least living a life that could not persist elsewhere. At chapel, he is reading Theophrastus. He is studying an undercurrent of the Italian Renaissance at a lecture on Thucydides. ”

“ The walls are barricaded only with ivy, or wallflower, or the ivy-leaved toadflax and its delicate bells. But the stranger never learns that the seclusion of Oxford is perennial, and that only in the vacations may he suffer from what the old pun calls porta eburna. The place is habitually almost deserted, except by the ghosts of the dead. Returning to it, when friends are gone, and every one is a stranger, the echoes of our footsteps in the walls are as the voices of our dead selves; we are among the ghosts; the past is omnipotent, even terrible. ”

“ At the inn—a classic inn to Oxford scholars—while the wind was purring in a yew tree, he put all his gloomier fancies in a tankard, where they were transmuted by a lambent ale and the “flaming ramparts” of that small world. The landlord was unloading a dray. As it is with men and clothes, remarked Philip, so with ale; the one grace of new ale is that it will one day be old. “May I,” he said, “in some world or another, be at least as old as this tankard, in the course of time: if I deserve it, as old as this inn: if I can, as old as these hills, with their whiskers of yew. ”