And "a house of all kinds of good letters" Trinity has remained, and will surely always remain. As we walk lingeringly through its halls and courts what thronging historic memories crowd upon us! We may not forget the failures as well as the successes; the defeats as well as the triumphs; "the lost causes and impossible loyalties" as well as the persistent faith and the grand achievement; but what an inspiration we feel must such a place be to the young souls who, year by year, enter its gates. How can the flame of ideal sympathy with the great personalities of their country's history fail to be kindled or kept alive in such a place? Here by the Great Gate, on the first floor to the north, are the rooms where Isaac Newton lived. It was to these rooms that in 1666 he brought back the glass prism which he had bought in the Stourbridge Fair, and commenced the studies which eventually made it possible for Pope to write the epitaph:-- "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." It was in these rooms that he had entertained his friends, John Locke, Richard Bentley, Isaac Barrow, Edmund Halley, Gilbert Burnett, who afterwards wrote of him, "the whitest soul I ever knew." It was here that he wrote his "Principia." It is in the ante-chapel close by that there stands that beautiful statue of him by Roubiliac, which Chantrey called "the noblest of our English statues," and of which Wordsworth has recorded how he used to lie awake at night to think of that "silent face" shining in the moonlight:-- "The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." And in the chapel beyond, with its double range of "windows richly dight" with the figures of saints and worthies and benefactors of the College--Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Harry Spelman, Lord Craven, Roger Cotes, Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Pearson, Bishop Barrow, Bishop Hacket, the poets Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Cowley and Dryden--is it possible for the youthful worshipper not sometimes to be aroused and uplifted above the thoughts of sordid vulgarity, of moral isolation, of mean ambition, to "see visions and dream dreams," visions of coming greatness for city, or country, or empire, visions of great principles struggling in mean days of competitive scrambling, dreams of opportunity of some future service for the common good, which shall not be unworthy of his present heritage in these saints and heroes of the past, who may-- "Live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues." CHAPTER XII ANCIENT AND PROTESTANT FOUNDATIONS