Then in the autumn, Sutton wrote about the coming together of the
College, the beginning of busy life after the long quiet of the vacation
days. For the first time he had gone to service in the College chapel.
He did not like the way of worship, finding it formal and meaningless;
but gradually, as the twilight faded away, and the great painted windows
filled with darkness--growing black in the candle-lit walls about
them--another impression came to him, looking at all those faces in the
dim light, and listening to their voices--an impression of the unity and
living spirit of the College, as being a small, ancient commonwealth,
with a history and traditions of its own. There they all were, just
themselves, shut in from the world outside, gathered together, as the
College had gathered together in the same place for five or six hundred
years. Though he was only there as a spectator, who had chanced to
wander in from the outside, yet he realized how great an influence such
a place, with all its old ways and customs, might have on the young
Englishmen who came there. Indeed, if the influence had not been so
obviously narrow and deadening he himself might have been a little
affected by it....
"Yes, you were right," he said in another letter, "when you told me that
the antiquity of England belongs to us Americans as much as to you....
Sometimes I fancy I had an ancestor here once; I am sure he was a
Puritan, and disapproved of the ecclesiasticism and worldliness of the
place. And yet, poor man, he could not help loving Oxford too. A
retired, melancholy person, he liked it best in the days like these when
the buildings and yellow and greenish trees are half veiled in the
autumn mist. But at last he went over with the Puritans to New England,
and was much better and more active there, and free from all the dreamy
influences that held him in Oxford. And it will be much better for me
too, when I go back next year."