When I ponder o'er the pages of the old romantic ages, ere the world
grew cold and gray,
When there wasn't a relation between Oxford and the Nation, or a
Movement every day,
How I marvel at the glamour (in these duller days and tamer) which
informed those scenes of glee,
At the glamour and the glory of contemporary story, and the Eights as
they used to be!
It is obvious that the weather must have differed altogether from the
kind that now we know:
I arise from reading Fiction with the permanent conviction that it did
not hail, nor snow:
For each fair and youthful charmer had a summer sun to warm her and a
bran new frock and hat,--
In the progress of the lustres, when the crowd of Fashion musters it
has grown too wise for that.
Every boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed
those Wavelets Blue,
While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a
commonplace type, like you--
In their strength and in their science they were positively giants,
through the gorgeous days of old,
Still an Admirable Crichton in those _lieben alten Zeiten_ was the
oarsman brave and bold:
He could row devoid of training, and (it hardly needs explaining) got
a quite unique degree:
With his blushing honours laden, he espoused a lovely maiden at the
end of Volume Three:
This alone he had to grieve for--that he'd nothing more to live for,
or expect from Fortune's whim:
For I never could discover, when his Oxford days were over, what the
world could hold for him!
O the rapture singlehearted of that Period has departed, with its
views ornate of Man,
And I think it won't come back till we restore the Pterodactyl, or
revive the late Queen Anne:
We have grown in mental stature, and we Go Direct to Nature, in these
days of stress and strife,
And the hero of a novel in a palace or a hovel is intolerably True to
Life:--
Not an infant learns to toddle but EFFICIENCY'S his model, which he
still pursues with rage,
In a manner inconsistent with the methods dim and distant of that
mid-Victorian age:
For that atmosphere Elysian it has faded from our vision and has gone
where the old tales go,
And I really don't know whether I regret altogether--but the simple
fact is so.