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 bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons.  Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes—­now scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage way.  If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what abysses would meet the eye!  What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale and awful spirals.  Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a sunny morning—­are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of our visible world?  Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are suffused with its lurid sparkle.  Man has worshipped sticks and stones and stars:  has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds?