Oxford

The cream of University life is the first summer term. Debts, as yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their shadow over the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one o’clock. There are so many things to do, —

‘When wickets are bowled and defended,When Isis is glad with the eights,When music and sunset are blended,When Youth and the Summer are mates,When freshmen are heedless of “Greats,”When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,Ah! these are the hours that one ratesSweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!’

There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to Cowley. There is the beautiful scenery of the ‘stripling Thames’ to explore; the haunts of the immortal ‘Scholar Gipsy,’ and of Shelley, and of Clough’s Piper, who —

‘Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and Godstowe.’

Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight and amuse in Oxford. 2 What day can be happier than that of which the morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a ‘commonising’ with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used to make! In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college staircase, and the ‘oak’ which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor. She comes in many a shape – as debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and often she comes as bereavement. Life and her claims wax importunate; to many men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all proportion to the real importance of academic success. We cannot see things as they are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if pleasures are more keen then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in later years, when we have known and survived a good deal of the worst of mortal experience. Often on men still in their pupilage the weight of the first misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of Dame Fortune’s whip is the most poignant. We cannot recover the first summer term; but it has passed into ourselves and our memories, into which Oxford, with her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass. He is not to be envied who has known and does not love her. Where her children have quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers. They have chosen the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in her grace and charm. These are crowded and hustled out of modern life; the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving still, at the Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.

If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford cease to be herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.

1

Poems by Ernest Myers. London, 1877.

2

A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in the Cornhill for September 1879.