the very locality appears to change: the visitor could scarcely
look more astonished if he were suddenly transported from the Coliseum
to the gardens of the Tuileries! No wonder a tourist once remarked, as
he issued from the cloisters: "I guess, sir, I've riz from the dead!"

It is tempting on this summer day to linger where grass is green and
trees throw grateful shade; and indeed it would seem that few of all the
many pens that have set down Oxford's charms have given their due to
these her natural delights. But there is much that crowds into the mind
and urgently complains lest there be not space enough to do them honour.
What of her streets? Perhaps no other city in England--some say in the
world--can boast of streets of equal beauty.

From Magdalen gate the High Street begins its curve--a true line of
beauty. Its variety of architecture and mixture of old with new might
suggest (to those who have only read and never seen) an inharmonious
whole. But somehow this is not so. The severe front of University
neither kills nor is killed by the seventeenth-century work, with
eighteenth-century cupola and statue of George II's consort, just across
the way. The old-world shops and gabled houses contrast with the modern
buildings, which contain the new Examination Schools, or show where some
college or other has forced its way into the High. They contrast, and do
not spoil the picture. Indeed it will be a cause of much lamentation, if
more of these old houses of the citizens of Oxford should be thrust
away, and the character of the street be changed to one long series of
college buildings, losing in colour, in variety, and in antiquity, and
especially in the story that it still tells of University and city
interdependent, and seeking each the other's good. It is the glorious
Church of St. Mary the Virgin that seems to bind all the varying charms
of the street together. Standing near the centre of the High, it
dominates the whole. The stately thirteenth-century tower with its
massive buttresses is surmounted by "a splendid pyramidal group of
turrets, pinnacles, and windows", from which the spire shoots upwards.
To a trained eye this spire is a continual marvel, when seen from a
short distance away, on account of the transparency of colour which for
some unexplained reason it presents. A silver grey hardly describes it;
but _light_ clothes it with a diaphanous glory, now warm now cool in
colour, and always lovely. Facing the s