tures, he had changed the
room scarcely at all. Curtains and covers, chairs and tables, all
preserved the character of the room itself as something that existed
outside the idiosyncrasies of the transient inhabitants who read and
laughed and ate and talked for so comparatively fleeting a space of time
between its four walls. With all that he had imposed of what in the
opinion of his contemporaries were eccentricities of adornment, the
rooms remained, as he would observe to any critic, essentially the same
as his own. Instead of college groups which marked merely by the height
of the individual's waistcoat-opening the almost intolerable fugacity of
their record, there were Leonardo and Blake and Frederick Walker to
preserve the illusion of permanence, or at least of continuity. Instead
of the bleached and desiccated ribs of momentarily current magazines
cast away in sepulchral indignity, there were a hundred quartos whose
calf bindings had the durableness and sober depth of walnut furniture,
furniture, moreover, that was still in use.

Yet it was in Venner's office where Michael found the perfect fruit of
time's infinitely fastidious preservation, the survival not so much of
the fittest as of the most expressive. Here, indeed, whatever in his own
rooms might affect him with the imagination of the eternal present of
finite conceptions, was the embodiment of the possible truth of those
moments in which at intervals he had apprehended, whether through
situations or persons or places, the assurance of immortality. Great
pictures, great music and most of all great literature would always
remain as the most obvious pledge of man's spiritual potentiality, but
these subtler intimations of momentary vision had such power to impress
themselves that Michael could believe in the child Blake when he spoke
of seeing God's forehead pressed against the window panes, could believe
that the soul liberated from the prison of the flesh had struggled in
the very instant of her recapture to state the ineffable. To him Blake
seemed the only poet who had in all his work disdained to attempt the
recreation of anything but these moments of positive faith. Every other
writer seemed clogged by human conceptions of grandeur. Most people,
seeking the imaginative reward of their sensibility, would obtain the
finest thrill that Oxford could offer from the sudden sight of St.
Mary's tower against a green April afterglow, or of the moon-parched
High Stre