esting Shotover is
pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a
hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles
homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye.
Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old
village well; back to four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then
for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_

And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will
have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet
and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be
what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels,
and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now.
There are the Schools....

_Bibury, April, 1913_.

CLOUDS

Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell,
perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling
amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of
Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The
travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of
those piled-up mysteries of heaven!

We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg.
That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the
English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!)
converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a
mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which
tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds,
hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height
of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of
golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in
ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite,
reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his
speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture
clothes itself!

Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways
of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of
form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had
fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the
Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the