Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/360

 to those ennobling influences of which I just spoke. The Gothic arches expand, far aloft, above the clean, spacious boxes, with polished sides, where the glossy hacks and hunters turn their heads to show you the whites of their charming eyes; and the little sculptured mediæval faces, at the spring of the groining, look down with a genial grin into the well-filled mangers. In this enjoyment of space, and air, and picturesqueness—this contact with the protective virtue of the past—the hacks and hunters have their knowledge of what I feel like calling the most satisfactory of human institutions. This is not too high a title to bestow upon a place like Hatfield. The last impression it made upon me was that of the force of circumstances. You cannot spend an afternoon there without feeling that circumstances are the major part of life; and if you go there disposed to say that they are literally everything, there is nothing in Hatfield that will contradict you. Everything in fact will seem to say to you that to have all that embodied tradition, that preserved picturesqueness, that domestic grandeur, as the background of one's personal life, is a pure gain, and not to have such things is a dead loss. A place like Hatfield is deeply aware of its own preciousness, and that is the argument it will hold. The wandering American, at least, will feel that he best consults the harmony of the occasion by assenting. The moral of mellow façade and quiet terraces, of oaken chambers and Elizabethan trees, will seem to him to be that we are made up by the things that surround us, and that such things as these make us up supremely well. He will find it impossible not to believe that they mould the character, that they refine the temper, that they make the whole nature strong and exquisite. How can he refuse to believe it? how can he be guilty of the incivility of not supposing that the people who have allowed him to pass his charming day have moulded characters and exquisite natures?

III. seemed to me a good fortune to have been asked down to Oxford at Commemoration by a gentleman implicated in the remarkable ceremony which goes on under that name, and who kindly offered me the hospitality of his college. I made, as the French say, neither one nor two; I simply took the first train. I had learned something of Oxford in former years, but I had never slept in a low-browed room looking out on a grassy quadrangle, opposite a mediæval clock-tower. This satisfaction was vouchsafed me on the night of my arrival. I was inducted into the rooms of an absent undergraduate. I sat in his deep armchairs; I burned his candles and read his books. I hereby thank him, from the bottom of my heart. Before going to bed I took a turn through the streets, and renewed in the silent darkness that impression of the charm imparted to them by the quiet college fronts which I had gathered in former years. The college fronts were now quieter than ever: the streets were empty, and the old scholastic city was sleeping in the warm starlight. The undergraduates had been withdrawing in large numbers, encouraged thereto by the collegiate authorities, who deprecate their presence at Commemoration. However many young gownsmen may be sent away, there always remain enough to make a noise. There can be no better indication of the resources of Oxford in a spectacular way than this fact, that the first step toward preparing an impressive ceremony is to get rid of the undergraduates. In the morning I breakfasted with a young American, who, in common with a number of his countrymen, had come hither to seek stimulus for a finer quality of study. I know not whether he would have reckoned as such stimulus the conversation of a couple of those ingenuous youths of Britain, whose society I always find charming; but it added, from my own point of view, to the local color of the entertainment.