Hall, her adopted daughter, S-----,
and I, with the Ex-Mayor) set forth, in an open barouche, to see the
remarkables of Oxford, while the rest of the guests went on foot. We
first drew up at New College (a strange name for such an old place, but
it was new some time since the Conquest), and went through its quiet and
sunny quadrangles, and into its sunny and shadowy gardens. I am in
despair about the architecture and old edifices of these Oxford colleges,
it is so impossible to express them in words. They are themselves--as
the architect left them, and as Time has modified and improved them--the
expression of an idea which does not admit of being otherwise expressed,
or translated into anything else. Those old battlemented walls around
the quadrangles; many gables; the windows with stone pavilions, so very
antique, yet some of them adorned with fresh flowers in pots,--a very
sweet contrast; the ivy mantling the gray stone; and the infinite repose,
both in sunshine and shadow,--it is as if half a dozen bygone centuries
had set up their rest here, and as if nothing of the present time ever
passed through the deeply recessed archway that shuts in the College from
the street.
Pages:
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180