LÆtissimus umbra.
And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.

The walls of Oxford are tufted with ivy-leaved toadflax, wallflower, and the sunny plant which botanists call “inelegant ragwort.” 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. They give that mild, well-sculptured country a soul. Even when the city is out of sight, its neighbourhood is not to be put by. Everywhere it is a suspected presence, a hidden melodist. Whether in memory or anticipation, it is, on all our walks, “like some grave thought threading a mighty dream.[Pg 488]”

I could wish that an inexorable Five Mile Act had kept it clear of red brick. Newman and Ruskin hinted at the same. I know not how to describe the spirit which turns a few miles of peaceful southern country into something so unique. But if I mention a wood or a stream, let the reader paint in, as it were, something sweet and shadowy in the distance, with his imagination or recollection; let it be as some subtle perfume in a pot pourri which makes it different from all others.

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. When the rain is not over and the sun has interrupted, the nightingale sings, where the stitchwort is starry amidst long grass that bathes the sweeping branches of thorn and brier; and I am now stabbed, and now caressed, by its changing song. Through the elms on either side, hot, rank grasses rise, crowned with a vapour of parsley flowers. A white steam from the soil faintly mists the grass at intervals. The grass and elms seem to be suffering in the rain, suffering for their quietness and solitude, to be longing for something, as perhaps Eden also dropped “some natural tears” when left a void. A potent, warm, and not quite soothing[Pg 490][Pg 489]

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perfume creeps over the grass, and makes the May blossom something elvish. I turn and look east. Almost at once, all these things are happily composed into one pleasant sense, and are but a frame to a tower and three spires of Oxford, like clouds—but the sky is suddenly cloudless.

I suppose that ivy has the same graceful ways on all old masonry, yet I have caught myself remembering, as if it were unique, that perfect ancient ivy that makes an arcade of green along the wall of Godstow nunnery. And in the same way, above all others I remember the pollard willows that lean this way and that along the Oxford streams—like prehistoric sculpture in winter, but in summer a green wave and full of voices. Never have I seen sunsets like those which make Wytham Wood and Marley Wood great purple clouds, and the clouds overhead more solid than they. 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. Looking at them at nightfall, it is hard to believe that they have been amidst ten thousand sunsets and remained the same; for they ponder great matters, and not only in[Pg 494] the autumn, but in May, when the silence is startled by the gurgling laughter of the hen cuckoo. 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. The only incidents, in twenty miles, were the occasional sprints of one who was devoted to a liver, or the cometary passing of one on a bicycle that sang Le Roi d’Ivetot as if it were a psalm containing the whole duty of man. And how a book—even a “schools” book—taken on the river or the hills, would yield a great sweetness to alternate handlings and laughter of several companions; or, if it were a dull book, might be made to yield more than its author ever meant. I have ever thought that the churchyard with a broken cross at Hinksey, and the willows below and the elms above, if one takes George Herbert there, is a better argument for the Church than Jewel and Chilling worth, if the old yew had not seemed the priest of some old superstition still powerful.

No one can walk much in the Oxford country without becoming a Pantheist. The influence of the city, the memories, the books he is fresh from, help the indolent[Pg 496][Pg 495]

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walker, who is content to sit under a hedge and wait for the best things, to make his gods. The lanes are peopled with no fairies such as in Wales and Ireland nimbly feed the fantasy, which here, in consequence, is apt to take flight in wonderful ways. I remember one (and Ovid was not at all in his mind) who was all but confident that he saw Persephone on flat pastures and red ploughlands, gleaming between green trees, when the hawthorn was not yet over and the roses had begun, and the sapphire dragon-fly was afloat, on the Cherwell, as the boat made a cool sound among the river’s hair, betwixt Water Eaton and Islip. On the quiet, misty, autumn mornings, the hum of threshing machines was solemn; and there at least it was a true harmony of autumn, and the man casting sheaves from the rick was exalted—

Everywhere the fancy, unaided by earlier fancies, sets to work very busily in these fields. I have on several afternoons gone some way towards the beginning of a new mythology, which might in a thousand years puzzle the Germans. The shadowy, half-apprehended faces of new deities float before my eyes, and I have wondered whether Apollo and Diana are not immortal presences wheresoever there are awful trees and alternating spaces of cool or sunlit lawn.... In the lanes there seems to be another religion for the night. There is a fitful wind, and so slow that as we walk we[Pg 500] can follow its path while it shakes the heavy leaves and dewy grass; and we feel as if we were trespassing on holy ground; the land seems to have changed masters, or rather to have One. 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.

The Oxford country is rich in footpaths, as any one will know that goes the round from Folly Bridge, through South Hinksey, to the “Fox” at Boar’s Hill (where the scent of wallflower and hawthorn comes in through the window with the sound of the rain and the nightingale); and then away, skirting Wootton and Cumnor, past the “Bear” (with its cool flagged room looking on a field of gold, and Cumnor Church tower among elms); and back over the Hurst, where he turns, under the seven firs and solitary elm, to ponder the long, alluring view towards Stanton Harcourt and Bablock Hythe. He may take that walk many times, or wish to take it, and yet never touch the same footpaths; and never be sure of the waste patch of bluebell and furze, haunted by linnet and whinchat; the newly harrowed field, where the stones shine like ivory after rain; the green lane, where the beech leaves lie in February, and rise out of the snow, untouched by it, in polished amber; the orchard, where the grass is[Pg 501] gloomy in April with the shadow of bright cherry flowers.

One such footpath I remember, that could be seen falling among woods and rising over hills, faint and winding, and disappearing at last,—like a vision of the perfect quiet life. We started once along it, over one of the many fair little Oxford bridges, one that cleared the stream in three graceful leaps of arching stone. The hills were cloudy with woods in the heat. On either hand, at long distances apart, lay little grey houses under scalloped capes of thatch, and here and there white houses, like children of that sweet land—albi circum ubera nati. For the most part we saw only the great hawthorn hedge, which gave us the sense of a companion always abreast of us, yet always cool and fresh as if just setting out. It was cooler when a red-hot bicyclist passed by. A sombre river, noiselessly sauntering seaward, far away dropped with a murmur, among leaves, into a pool. That sound alone made tremble the glassy dome of silence that extended miles on miles. All things were lightly powdered with gold, by a lustre that seemed to have been sifted through gauze. The hazy sky, striving to be blue, was reflected as purple in the waters. There, too, sunken and motionless, lay amber willow leaves; some floated down. Between the sailing leaves, against the false sky, hung the willow shadows,—shadows of willows overhead, with waving foliage, like the train of a bird of paradise. Everywhere the languid perfumes of corruption. Brown leaves laid their fingers on the[Pg 502] cheek as they fell; and here and there the hoary reverse of a willow leaf gleamed in the crannied bases of the trees. A plough, planted in mid-field, was curved like the wings of a bird alighting.

We could not walk as slowly as the river flowed; yet that seemed the true pace to move in life, and so reach the great grey sea. Hand in hand with the river wound the path, until twilight began to drive her dusky flocks across the west, and a light wind knitted the aspen branches against a silver sky with a crescent moon, as, troubled tenderly by autumnal maladies of soul, we came to our place of rest,—a grey, immemorial house with innumerable windows.[Pg 503]

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