But if

There are glimpses everywhere which lure one away from this lovely garden of New College; in every quadrangle there are associations with great names. one is in a meditative mood, he will be loath to exchange the silence of this venerable garden for the magnificence of the Christ Church quadrangles or for the noble vista of High Street, which Hawthorne long ago pronounced the most impressive street in England. The spell of Oxford is in the air, and one comes under it most entirely when he loiters in one of these ancient fastnesses of the beautiful English verdure. As one waits on the genius of the place, one recalls the words of the pure and noble scholar whose life and thought had been an education to his country. No modern man has valued scholarship more intelligently and justly than Emerson. His life was given to its pursuits, and his work, singularly free from the intrusion of the processes and terminology of scholarship, is ripe with its wisdom and weighty in expression of its large results. "A scholar," said Emerson, "is the favourite of heaven and earth, the ex

cellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men." Never were truer words written; the world does not reward its scholars as it rewards those who achieve more practical or more striking and picturesque successes, but in its heart it honours them and recognises, by instinct if not by intelligence, that they are the ministers of its noblest interests. Those only who have had a share, however small, in the pursuit of knowledge for its own. sake know how engrossing the pursuit is, and how all other forms of activity lose interest in comparison with it. There is for all such minds an irresistible fascination in the scholar's work; a spell which makes the years one long preoccupation, and life an intense and insatiable hunger for more light and truth. The pedant deals with the husks of things, but the scholar deals with the great realities which are disclosed and expressed in the vast range of human knowledge. He lives continually in the great moments and with

the great minds; he escapes the limitations. of the passing hour into the great past or into the larger movement of his own time. The noblest works of the noblest men are his habitual companions, and he looks upon life with eyes which distinguish its main currents from its conflicting and momentary eddies.

Here, within these ivy-clad walls, with this vision of medieval towers and turrets and spires, embosomed in a quiet in which great voices seem to be hushed, one

believes with Emerson that the scholar is the most fortunate of men. One recalls the ripe and fruitful seekers after truth who have lived and died in these peaceful retreats; pacing year after year these shaded walks, working in the libraries, meditating by the mullioned windows with all the magical beauty of Oxford spread out before them. Was it not Hawthorne who wished that he had one life to spend entirely in Oxford? In this enchanting "home of lost causes and impossible. loyalties" one could easily imagine himself becalmed forever; always meaning to break the charm and return to the turbulent

world not two hours away, and yet always postponing the final parting to a morrow which never comes.

From the reverie into which the firelight on the bit of landscape has lured me insensibly, I awake to find the fire dying and the sky splendid with the midnight stars. The towers of Oxford have become once more a memory, but that which gives them their most enduring charm may be here as well as there; for here no less than beside the Isis one may love scholarship and pursue it, one may hold to the things of the mind against all the temptations of materialism, one may live his own life of thought.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A WORD FOR

IDLENESS

HE study fire is sometimes so potent a solicitation to reverie that I ask myself whether it be not a subtle kind of temptation. Even when a man has cleared himself of the cant of the day, as Carlyle would put it, and delivered himself of the American illusion that every hour not devoted to "doing something" is an hour wasted, the inherited instinct is still strong enough to make a faint appeal to conscience. Those active, aggressive words, "doing" and "getting," have so long usurped the greater part of the space in our vocabulary that we use the words "being" and "growing" with a little uncertainty; most of us are not entirely at ease with them yet. One of the highest uses of literature is the aid