ad!
Spires as sharp as thrushes' bills to pierce the sky with song.
How it shook the heart of one, the swaying and the swinging,
How it set the blood a-tramp and all the brains a-singing,
Aye, and what a world of thought the calmer chimes came bringing,
Telling praises every hour
To His majesty and power,
Telling prayers with punctual service, summers, centuries, how long?
The beads upon our rosary of immemorial song."
_The Minstrelsy of Isis_.

Oxford is a subject from which one cannot easily tear oneself: so I make
no apology for returning to it. In that delightful book, "The Minstrelsy
of Isis," I have found an anonymous poem beginning

"Royal heart, loyal heart, comrade that I loved,"

and, in the spirit of that line, I dedicate this chapter to the friend
whom I always regarded as the Ideal Undergraduate.[17] Other names and
other faces of contemporaries and companions come crowding upon the
memory, but it is better, on all accounts, to leave them unspecified. I
lived quite as much in other colleges as in my own, and in a fellowship
which was gathered from all sorts and sections of undergraduate life.
Let the reader imagine all the best and brightest men in the University
between 1872 and 1876, and he will not go far wrong in assuming that my
friends were among them.

My Oxford life was cut sharply into two halves by a very definite
dividing-line; the first half was cheerful and irresponsible enough. A
large part of the cheerfulness was connected with the Church, and my
earliest friendships (after those which I brought with me from Harrow)
were formed in the circle which frequented St. Barnabas. I am thankful
to remember that my eyes were even then open to see the moral beauty and
goodness all around me, and I had a splendid dream of blending it all
into one. In my second term I founded an "Oxford University Church
Society," designed to unite religious undergraduates of all shades of
Churchmanship for common worship and interchange of views. We formed
ourselves on what we heard of a similar Society at Cambridge; and, early
in the Summer Term of 1873, a youth of ruddy countenance and graceful
address--now Canon Mason and Master of Pembroke--came over from
Cambridge, and told us how to set to work. The effort was indeed
well-meant. It was blessed by Churchmen as dissimilar as Bishop
Mackarness, Edwin Palm