I presume that the men I met there were very excellent specimens of Oxford. The undergraduates had left the university, and the Fellows of Oriel dined, not in hall, but in the wine-room. A curious feature of the meal, the grace, has been, I believe, incorrectly given by visitors. Before dinner they say "Benedictus benedicat," and after dinner, i.e., just before dessert, somebody drops his head in the middle of the talk and says "Benedicto benedicatur." The room is hung round with pictures of the ancient and recent worthies of the college. A fine and large likeness of Clough looked down upon the warm and pleasant scene. This sort of living, compared with the only bachelor modes of existence I had ever experienced, a club, a boarding-house, or a hotel, seemed perfection. And if the old wainscoted room, and the company of the genial scholars was so pleasing, what did I think one evening when dining at Merton College, famed for the beauty of its gardens, coffee was served in a rustic seat on the lawn, and, as the summer evening came down upon the grass and the still trees, and a star or two came out and brightened, and the towers over us and about us grew grayer and darker, we sat and conversed, and listened far into the twilight.

In a week's stay about Oxford I saw it in many forms and moods. An Oxford quadrangle is the hoariest and most ancient spectacle in my experience. Shut up in one of them at the time of sun-down the impression is particularly strong. One feels the planet to have aged. I found it difficult to conceive that a scene yet strong with the strength of Nature remained anywhere in the world. It was hard to think that beyond the swelling and sinking Atlantic the blue line of the Allegany trembled over the quiet harvests of a familiar valley, or that the stream of the yellow Missouri drowned with disconsolate floods his black slimy islands of

sand.

Some of the quadrangles were very gray and somber; others were warm and happy. In the cloisters of Magdalen they have found the flower which best harmonizes with the associations of the place. It is the wild rose. Upon a mid-summer afternoon when Oxford is deserted, when no feet but your own are heard in the cloisters, when the blue air of the quadrangle is warmed to the fill by the sun, there is that in the odor of the flower of wild, yet sweet, of gay, yet yearning, which harmo

nizes well with the spongy turf, with the moist air thrilled by the sunshine, with the cold recesses of the cloister and the benign silence with which the scene regards your footfall.

The character for learning of the men I met at the universities stands, I suppose, as high as that of the same class of men anywhere in the world. It is a pleasure to me to dwell upon their candor and kindness. I discovered scarcely anything to find fault with. "We grow a very disagreeable specimen of prig here," said one. I did not see him. Here and there I met a man whose playfulness had a somewhat learned flavor and whose speeches might, when repeated, have had a sound of pedantry, but the awkwardness was accompanied by a simplicity which made it rather attractive. I must say, though, that the wit was a little wordy-but that is true of the wit of young college tutors everywhere; their jokes may be said to have extension, their jests and quips remind one of the gambols of a Newfoundland pup. The older men, where they were not more solemn, had rather more pith and point. But the wit of scholars is apt to be diluted, just as is that of the man of fashion, though from a different cause. The wit of the man of fashion shares the general feebleness of his nature; that of the scholar is poor because he does not see enough of life; because the situations in which he is an actor or a looker on are not sufficiently numerous. various and rapidly successive.

What especially strikes the visitor at the universities, is their way of speaking the unadulterated truth; it does not occur to them that anything else should be spoken. They have their pretenders and humbugs in England just as here, men who live and thrive by the inevitable folly and inattention of the mass of the community. Some poor offspring of a lucky talent and a lucky opportunity wins applause and place and profit with scarcely a struggle. Some light creature gets the start of this tremendous world and is swept onward like a leaf. Oxford and Cambridge are the places to hear these men called by their right names. is just as well that most people do not indulge in such plain speaking, for most people would be apt to be mistaken. But at the universities there are many thinking, educated men, whose opinions are tolerably apt to be correct. They are very little troubled with that charity which will

It

say no ill of your neighbor because the report of it may come to your neighbor's ear. They have no axes to grind, no ulterior aims, no policies. One evening at Oxford a well known name was mentioned, and the whole company at once agreed that he was an ass. That was my own opinion, but had I mentioned it among people more polite and circumspect, I should have been thought, if not a jealous and deprecatory person, at least a very rash one-or, perhaps, one of those envious detractors who go about tearing the reputations of the great and good. The man was certainly dull and talkative, yet he deserved respect of a kind. There was an acerbity, however, in the comment which his folly did not quite explain. Why should they so go out of the way to abuse a comparatively unimportant man for merely being an ass? This point was naïvely met by one ingenious young accuser, who said, "After all, the only thing I have against him is that he's a successful man. To one exceedingly vivacious, agreeable and original old gentleman who had been an inmate of Oxford pretty much since his nursery days, I mentioned a much praised book, and asked his opinion of it. It was in some department of political science upon which I should not have ventured to express an opinion. He said promptly that there was a great deal more talk than thought in it. "Why," I asked, "the best reviewers call it a triumph for England, and the critics give you the impression that the writer has a deal more of modest merit than reputation.' "That is just what I say," he replied, "the success

of the work has been made by the press; the book is a fair one, and the author is a competent man, but it is wordy and in no way remarkable."

English writers upon this country have given us the impression that their scholars are less men of the world than our own. I found the young men at Oxford and Cambridge very greatly interested in matters outside their universities. Many of them, I thought, were piqued by the social power which the aristocracy still retains in England, for no men are better placed than themselves to see how belated is the entire face of their society. Not a few of them have aspirations for political careers. Many of them are barristers and have chambers in London, some few conducting cases, but most of them waiting for them. For men who are only students and citizens of the world, the greatest city in Europe is but two hours away. It is they who get most out of university life. They may infest, if they choose, those old quadrangles of Oxford for a lifetime; the ends of Europe are within two days of them. The physical man and the eating, drinking and sleeping man are well enough cared for. They have the great libraries, and the constant society of cultivated men in such numbers that they may look about among themselves for suitable acquaintance. They have for a home one of the most beautiful places in the world. the world. There is scarcely a happy circumstance of a scholar's life which fortune and the generous wisdom of the men who have been through centuries the custodians of the university have denied them.

IN the letter of cordial thanks that came presently to Emilia from the unknown, this time with the postmark of the distant city, an address was given to which she might send a reply. There was a little fire on her hearth, for the mornings and nights were now cool among the hills; Emilia laid the note with its two forerunners on the coals, and watched them shrivel and blaze ere she wrote the reply whose idea she at first had flouted.

They were

"I have burned your letters. most kind-too kind for me. I do not know how you found me out. I do not know what makes me trust you so-perhaps my need. But I must try to do my duty alone."

She mailed the letter herself, walking to the village post-office. The woods through which she went on the side of the Cliff were in the perfect ripeness of their green growth; sometimes a red branch holding

out a torch to illuminate the mossy depths where all wild vines and briers ran riot over the sharp and scattered fragments fallen from the Cliff a century since; sometimes a wilderness of withered ferns and brakes spreading in the shadow a field of the cloth of gold. A royal wealth of asters and golden-rods glistening with gossamers lined all the path, and here and there a brook, swollen by the early rains, rushed down the wayside steep, a torrent of raging silver falling from the clouds, and gentians and maiden-hair received the spray. The year rested like a fuil tide whose ebb one has not begun to perceive, and Emilia felt the cheeriness soothe her perturbation. But coming out upon the open country, and seeing the soft low-hanging mists half veiling the winy and golden mosaic of the meadows, and seeing the mountains clothe themselves in new forms and tender colors as she walked, the earthly purple slopes, with all their bloom of distance, refining into the clearer light of infinity and heaven, she felt at odds with the great peace and beauty. "I am nothing but an atom," she said. This hard nature goes on the same whether I am wretched or happy. What difference does it make whether I am good or bad?" And she went along, with her wounds freshly opened. As she came inside the gates she met Ordronnaux waiting to make the customary ceremonious adieux ere he rode to the station, amusing himself the while with the prancing of his badly broken horse. He smiled as she approached. "Good-bye," he cried. shall be gone perhaps ten days," and he reined up his horse beside her, but did not dismount. "Now," he said gayly, “if I were a knight in an old ballad, you would step upon my foot and climb behind me, and cast your arms about me,' and we should ride away and see the world together!" It was but lately he could have spoken in that light manner to Emilia.

66

I

"How can you mock me so?" she said, and hurried on.

If Emilia were solitary now, there was presently a certain freedom in the solitude, a comprehension that at last Ordronnaux cared for her so little that she should be annoyed no more by his anxieties, which sent her spirits up a buoyant and defiant height, and made her feel capable of wild and daring action; and it was an, unfortunate time for another letter to arrive from the unknown, for she would surely answer it.

And another letter came from him, re

fusing to be silenced, pronouncing their correspondence as legitimate as that of any other friendship, declaring himself, in deferentially masked, but unmistakable language, no votary, no lover, saying that through great trouble which had befallen him he needed her consolation as she needed his.

Emilia, of course, failed to see the impertinence of the very existence of this letter. Otherwise, there was a certain delicacy and firmness in its tone that was agreeable to her. When it went on with some slight confidences, it interested her. In years he was not far before her, but in experience, in sensation, he was a generation her senior, the writer said,-trusting possibly to Emilia's literal reception of his words, and when they met, if ever, he should be older still by all the crowded experiences of the enterprise he was about to undertake. And he urged her to write to him freely, to write the small incidents of her days, her thoughts, and fancies-a distraction to her, and a delight to him.

And Emilia did.

If her correspondent were one who had any design of evil, he must have been surprised at the simplicity of her letters, awestruck, in a degree, at the innocence and purity of her soul as those letters translated it, while week by week passed and they still came, speaking of her uneventful life, the books she read, the sights she saw, the reflection those sights kindled — letters dealing at first with little but outside objects, then lingering with enthusiasm over the account of some book she had come across in the great dark library, till stimulated by replies, they hurried on towards emotional and personal confessions, guileless and trifling confidings of a hitherto unsoiled nature ignorant of the wrong and dangers here, but confidings which opened the way to closest intimacy. In one letter she had to tell of the autumn burning of the brush at night, and the huge apparitions of the burners passing before the blaze from vast star-lit darkness to darkness, and of the contrast between that Dantean scene and that of the first snow on the Chieftain's head, one blushing sunrise just as the Indian summer came. And if, in reply, he warned her against becoming the spectator at scenic effects of nature rather than the sharer of nature's moods and phases, it only gave her a greater sense of security in writing. In another letter she told him of her climbing the hill in the late autumn

morning to see a rainbow slowly throwing its arch along, and building across the hills beneath. A wondrous sight;" she wrote, "the edge of a far blue hill grew green and vivid, then the yellow light broke in a flash beyond, like a wave whose foam was rosy, and as the rose, the gold, the green, came on, the violet followed, the mists rose to make it, weaving to and fro a weft spun of the very dew of the morning, so airy, so unsubstantial, and yet, as the arch sprang whole and perfect, so firm and so fixed, that I could think only of the solid stones at the foundation of the earth, the shining stones, rather, at the foundation of the City of God, you remember, with its chrysoprase, its jacinth and amethyst. St. John must have climbed a mountain-top, and have seen just such a thing as this beneath him before he told of the rainbow like an emerald round the throne."

"Do you think so?" the answer came. "For my part, I imagine the prophet, as the poet, needs no more actual sight than the inner apocalyptic vision. You and I are perhaps far enough from the City of God, -I am, I know, and need to climb the heights; but to St. John in the desert, that City descended out of heaven. Yet you have interpreted the meaning of your rainbow, the everlasting firmness of the great viewless laws, better than words interpret music."

"I am in the desert too," she wrote; "and your letters are bringing me a heavenly peace there. And peace in my house, too,-for, as the master of it comes and goes, I can even pity him that he has no such resource, such haven as I have, and can feel some interest in his existence, some sorrow for his state, and the eyes of his dead mother do not pain me as they did. And now that the winter is all about me, and I am shut in by one of its great white, whirling, moonlighted storms, I feel like a cradled child."

"I am glad you are at peace," he wrote, "It ought to give me peace to know it. But alas! still there is for me the next thing to peace-effort; and for that all directions are open. What if, while you harmonize the elements of your life, I should lose myself striving to complete a harmony only less perfect than spiritual unisons can be? Do you recall, in the little book I sent you, that conception of a future art in which the great science and beauty of color should be developed as fully as that of sound has been? Since

nobody feels more keenly than I what may be the opulence of the unrevealed reserves of color in the dark and chemic rays, nobody exults more keenly in the depths of the unexhausted wells of color that we have, why shall not I begin the development? To me a sheet of clear and pure tint, be it blush or blue or amber, gives rapturous and inmost satisfaction; and let such colors flow into one another with soft counterchange and silvery blooms, and I have the delight that a perfect strain of music gives. Think then, to those who love absolute color passionately, what some great symphony, founded on the seven colors as on the seven tones, might be, with the palpitating glow and gloom, the combination of its chords, the magnificent movement of its members through all delicious fluctuation to complete correspondence and marriage! Think of a chromata in violet minor, with its radiant correlations! Think of that fancy of Haweis' of delicate melodies composed of single floating lights, changing and melting from one slow intensity to another, through the dark, until some tender dawn of opal from below might perchance receive the last fluttering pulse of ruby light and prepare the eye for some new passage of exquisite color!' Well, somebody is to discover the notation from which these marvels are to be produced-why not I? to discover, the instruments, and decide whether they shall appeal to chemistry or to electricity. To my mind those instruments are all ready for the final touch; for since color, as well as sound, is the result of vibration, all that is necessary may be to combine the initial of light and sound, which it would seem that electricity could do in some attachment to the present musical instrument; so that the strings, for instance, should produce the vibration requisite to render the violet rays, the brass the brilliant yellows, the wood the deep rich reds. Think then of the orchestra that in producing any matchless piece,

Somebody is

the Italian Symphony,-shall translate every tone into its own color, or rather every color into its own tone, and you sit with all that changing splendor entrancing your soul to the accompaniment of its perfect music! Yet, I suppose, it is not for this generation to do, but for one whose childhood is the master of many sciences. I suppose that generation is to come; for since education in the parent becomes instinct in the child, there cannot but some