fortified post of the
Barbarians."

OXFORD

From 'Essays in Criticism'

No, we are all seekers still! seekers often make mistakes, and I wish
mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch Oxford.
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene!

"There are our young barbarians all at play!"

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the
moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the
Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps
ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to
perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another
side?--nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tuebingen. Adorable
dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so
prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to
the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and
unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so
inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could
ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that
bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the death of
Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller
deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him: the
bondage of "_was uns alle bandigt, Das Gemeine!_" She will forgive me,
even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her
unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is,
after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against
the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance
has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we
are gone?

TO A FRIEND

Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?--
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.
Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But he his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor pass