Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

The friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to / care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began / to express it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our / train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was / going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there / for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been / able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact / that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of / which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of / Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflorescence of the / past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we / had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables / no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of / the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station / where each of our passengers was welcomed by at least three sons or / brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else's boxes in the confiding / distributions from the luggage-vans.

As our passengers were mostly / mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a / nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in / the worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town / is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of / cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers, / but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide / of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in / all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of / the meetings at the station, if I did not say that the meeters were / quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued / together from the place these contributed their advantageous / disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the / proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and / against walls, before their advancing flood.

Our own friend who, lief and dear as any son or brother or nephew or / cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to / greet us at the station, had in a wonderfully little while divined our / baggage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into / the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we / perceived was no petrification, but a living growth from the soul of the / undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there. / We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or / plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortar-boards, and gowns clipped / of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand / anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no / undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets without this / abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full / of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in / the ordinary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened / suspicion in the authorities. We were, in fact, driving through a / largeish town, peopled beyond its comfortable wont, and noisy with the / rush of feet and wheels far frequenter and swifter than those which set / its characteristic pace.

Our friend knew we were not, poor things, there for a tumult which we / could have easily had in New York, or even in London, and he made haste / to withdraw us from it up into a higher place at the top of the / Radcliffe Library, where we could look down on all Oxford, with the / tumult subsiding into repose under the foliage and amid the flowers of / the college gardens. It is the well-known view which every one is / advised by the guide-books to seize the first thing, and he could not / have done better for us, even from his great love and lore of the place, / than to point severally out each renowned roof and spire and tower which / blent again for my rapture in a rich harmony with nothing jarring from / the whole into any separately accentuated fact. I pretended otherwise, / and I hope I satisfactorily seemed to know those tops and deeps one from / another, when I ignorantly exclaimed, "Oh, Magdalen, of course! Christ / Church! And is that Balliol? And Oriel, of course; and Merton, and / Jesus, and Wadham -- really Wadham? And New College, of course! And is / _that_ Brasenose?"

I honestly affected to remember them from a first visit twenty years / before, when in a cold September rain I wandered about among them with a / soul dry-shod and warmed by an inner effulgence of joy in being there on / any sort of terms. But I remembered nothing except the glory which / nothing but the superior radiance of being there again in May could / eclipse. What I remember now of this second sight of them will not let / itself be put in words; it is the bird which sings in the bush, and / alertly refuses to double its value by coming into the hand. I could not / now take the most trusting reader up into that high place, and hope to / abuse his innocence by any feigned knowledge of those clustering / colleges. All is a blur of leafy luxuriance, probably the foliage of the / garden trees which embower the colleges, but not so absolutely such that / it does not seem the bourgeoning and branching edifices themselves, a / sumptuous Gothic suggestion, in stem and spray, of the stone-wrought / beauty of the halls and chapels where nature might well have studied her / effects of Perpendicular or Early English, or that spiritual Flamboyant / in which she excels art. There remains from it chiefly a sense of / flowery color which I suppose is from the nearer-to insistence of trees / everywhere in bloom.