The lantern of the Radcliffe Library appears between the column and the picturesque house covered with greenery, above which rises the tower and spire of St. Mary’s, the University Church. Between this house and a lower building--St. Mary’s Hall--runs St. Mary’s Hall Lane, emerging into “the High” opposite the porch of St. Mary’s Church. The buildings on the extreme right of the picture are those belonging to Oriel College.] with jests and fancies that disenthroned all powers except fantasy and adventure and mirth. Out of doors, at Yarnton or Cumnor or Tew, he seemed near kinsman to the sun and the south wind, so that for a time we were one with them, with a sense of mystery and of pride. And, whether in or out of doors, he loved the night, because her hands were soft, and he found the shadows _infernis hilares sine regibus_, as in the world of Saturn. He would hail the morn as he saw her from a staircase window with “Sweet cousin” and such follies; and would go into the chapel on summer evenings without a candle to see prophet and apostle lit by the tender beam. He wrote, and never printed, much verse. When I look at it now, I wonder in what language it was conceived, and where the key is hidden, and by what shores and forests to-day, men speak or dream it. The verses seem to maturer eyes but as crude translations out of silence. Yet in the old days we called him sometimes the Last, sometimes the First, of the Bards, so nimble and radiant was his spirit. He seemed one that might have written _Tamerlane_ in his youth, after a pot of sack with Shakespeare at the “Crown” in Cornmarket Street. I know not whether to call him immemorially old or young. He had touches of the golden age, and as it were a tradition from the singer who was in that ship which First through the Euxine seas bore all the flower of Greece. Unlike other clever people in Oxford he was brilliant in early morning; would rise and talk and write at dawn,--go a-maying,--sing hunting ditties amid the snow to the leaden east and the frozen starlings, by Marston or above Wytham and Eynsham. His laugh fell upon our ears like an echo from long-forgotten, Arcadian existences; it was in harmony with the songs of thrushes and the murmur of the Evenlode. Coming into his room we expected to see a harp at his side. But where are the voices that we heard and uttered?-- Are they exiled out of stony breasts, Never to make return? Once more is the blackbird’s fluting a mystery save that it speaks of him, last of the Bards.