In Cornwall and Across the Sea :: :: University of Virginia Library

Oxford, the Grand Undoer, thou dost cost
More than thou yieldest those who tread thy stones,
Not unforgetful of the men, whose bones
Have lain long ages in their bodies' dust
But who were once the glory and the trust
Of college, then of country—more than once
Of country first,—if then, as at the nonce,
The man, who academic honours lost,
Was laying the foundations of a name
More lasting than a roll of scholarships,
A fellowship, and medals—or the fame,
Which halos a great teacher of the hour,
To undergo perpetual eclipse
Upon the rise of some new teaching power.

291

II.

Oxford, the Grand Undoer, thou undoest
The men, who in their ordinary sphere
Might have made many a hundred pounds a year
As merchants, lawyers, doctors, whom thou wooest
To this of true æsthetic lives the truest—
The quest of knowledge free from any care
If golden fruit or not this knowledge bear—
These, when to true disciples thou subduest,
Thou takest from their own broad, beaten path
To wander in the pleasaunces, where they
Cull neither first-fruits nor the after-math,
But only wander with an aimless pleasure,
Losing at every hour and turn their way,
And finding nought of the too-scanty treasure.

292

III

Oxford, the Grand Undoer! he, on whom
Thou layest the enchantment of thy rule,
Can never settle to an office-stool
But with the feeling of a living tomb,
Or give his thoughts and industry in gloom
Of London courts to ledger work, or school
His mind, attuned to antique cloisters cool
In Oxford, to a hot and whirring room,
With vast machines and hands-in-hundreds filled.
He has lived the life of Oxford and can ne'er
The fairy castles in his brain unbuild;
And, though 'mid looms and ledgers he may sit,
His heart and fancy never will be there
But to the country of his castles flit.

293

IV.

Oxford, the Grand Undoer—whom indeed
Undost thou not? The giants of their kind,
The men who have such mastery of mind
That the world stops to listen or to read
Their pregnant words, of pregnant work the seed.
In ordinary callings of mankind
Such men would waste their powers, would not find
The where-withal of food their minds to feed.
These Oxford calls from following their sheep
To intellectual thrones. By her not found
Their mighty intellects would eat, drink, sleep,
And die within their sheep-folds, and the world
Would know not of the royal heads uncrowned
The oriflammes of genius unfurled.

294

V.

Oxford is not a school for little men,
But training ground, where men of giant mould
May the full powers of their frames unfold,
At best a lottery where few may gain
Aught but the paltriest prizes, or attain
To heights where they may strike a bee-line bold
Unto the goal, which in their minds they hold.
The rest must linger in the thick-scrubbed plain
Where, if they leave the common beaten track,
They lose themselves—too lucky if they can
Win by supremest efforts their way back.
Oxford is but a school for drudge and king.
For him no king, and yet no common man,
She hath but little in her hand to bring.