Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/109

HENRY JAMES 83 delight of an heir coming home after exile. He has nothing but his " nice tastes, fine sympathies and sentiments " ; apart from that he '* doesn't pay five cents in the dollar " ; but he ofiPers his sharpened senses, made the more sensitive by fasting, to all the great traditional features of the consolatory Anglo-Saxon scene. He prowls about London — visits Hampton Court — wanders deep into the shires — seeks lastly the supreme sacredness of Oxford : the " action " of the tale — its love-affair and phantom — is scarcely more than a piece of delicate clockwork to keep his impressions softly circling, a cycle of familiar English hours ; and the episodes that ring, with gradually deepening note, are but the due chimes, silvery or golden, to point and punctuate their passing. The counti^-slde, in the full ivarin rains of the last of April, hoAi hurst into sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the hedgeroivs had tuinied into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn and meadow been tvashed over tvith a lighter brush. We went forth tvithout loss of time for a long ivalk on the great grassy hills, stnooth arrested central billows of so7ne primitive upheaval, from the summit of which you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties, within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation, taking the mild English light. Again : — Passing through the small oblique streets in which the long, grey, battered public face of the colleges seems to watch jealously for sounds tJiat may break upon the stillness of study, you feel it the moat dignified and most educated of cities. . . . Directly after our arrwal my friend and I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge that underspans the ivalls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired toiver, delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty — tJie perfect prose of Gothic — wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained of day.