pinion, all the pent
energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes,
I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the
flame; and it is just in this fervency of thought and feeling that
Oxford is Prophetic. It is the tradition that in one year of the
storm-tossed 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was
Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge
was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century
at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she
has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded
with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain lie
thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of
theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social
and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which
Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the
fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding
generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring
strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery.
Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life
to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and
denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our
strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls for our
opponents' feet which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and
nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the
resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the
irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was
cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.

But now all that passion, genuine enough while it lasted, lies far back
in the past, and we learn the secret which we never discovered while as
yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we
were the most desperate partisans; we asked no quarter, and gave none;
pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and
made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have
died out of our ears, gentler voices begin to make themselves heard. All
at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only
sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which
we strove may have b