Of the fifteenth-century foundations, All Souls, "The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed," and especially of those who fell in the French wars, retains much of its original architecture; in the kitchen of Lincoln, if not in the chapel, Shakespeare would still find himself at home; and for him, as for all the generations since, the lofty tower of Magdalen rose as Oxford's crown of beauty. Magdalen College is ancient. The very speaking of the name (Maudlin) tells us that, all the more unmistakably because Magdalen Bridge and Magdalen Street carry the modern pronunciation. But Magdalen College, with its springing, soaring grace, its surprises of delight, its haunting, soul-possessing loveliness, has all the winning charm of youth. Its hundred acres of lawn and garden, wood and park, where deer browse peacefully beneath the shade of giant elms and where Addison's beloved Water Walks beside the Cherwell are golden with the primroses and daffodils of March and blue with the violets and periwinkles of later spring, are even more tempting to the book-fagged wanderer than Christ Church Meadow and "Mesopotamia." It is hard to tell when Magdalen is most beautiful. It has made the circle of the year its own. On May Day dawn, all Oxford, drowsy but determined, gathers in the broad street below to see--it depends upon the wind whether or no one may hear--the choir chant their immemorial hymn from the summit of the tower. When the ending of the rite is made known to the multitude by the flinging over of the caps,--black mortar-boards that sail slowly down the one hundred and fifty feet like a flock of pensive rooks,--then away it streams over Magdalen Bridge toward Iffley to gather Arnold's white and purple fritillaries, and, after a long and loving look at Iffley's Norman Church, troops home along the towing-path beside the Isis. Shakespeare may himself have heard, if he chanced to be passing through on St. John Baptist's Day, the University sermon preached from the curiously canopied stone pulpit well up on the wall in a corner of one of the quadrangles, while the turf was sweet with strewn rushes and all the buildings glistening with fresh green boughs. But even in midwinter Magdalen is beautiful, when along Addison's Walk the fog is frosted like most delicate enamel on every leaf and twig, and this white world of rime takes on strange flushes from the red sun peering through the haze.