Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges, Your portals statued with old kings and queens, Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries, Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens, Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans, Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports New-risen o'er awaken'd Albion. No! Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow Melodious thunders thro' your vacant courts At noon and eve, because your manner sorts Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart, Because the lips of little children preach Against you, you that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart. About eleven o'clock the Poet took me out alone. We went first to Freshwater Gate, where he said the "maddened scream of the sea" in "Maud" had been first suggested to him. He talked of our late friend, Philip Stanhope Worsley, the translator of the _Odyssey_ and half of the _Iliad_, who was living there a good many years ago, and whom I had met at his table. He admired him much. He talked also, but I forget to what effect, of "The Holy Grail" and the old Arthur myth, but before this we talked of the Cambridge Sonnet just mentioned. "There was no _love_," he said, "in the system." I understood him to mean that the dons, as a rule, were out of sympathy with the young men. He spoke also of the bullying he had undergone at his first school; how, when he was a new boy of only seven and a half, he was sitting on the school steps crying and homesick. Up came a big fellow, between seventeen and eighteen, and asked him roughly who he was and what he was crying for, and then gave him a kick in the wind! This experience had evidently rankled in his mind for more than seventy years. Again, in April 1890, he told me the same story. But to return to our morning walk of December 14, 1886. Something led me to speak of my favourite lines: The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Spedding, it seems, and others had wanted him to alter the "one _good_ custom." "I was thinking" he said, "of knighthood." He went on to speak of his "Experiments in Quantity," and in particular of the Alcaic Ode to Milton, beginning: O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies. "I thought _that_," he said, "a bit of a _tour de force_," and surely he was right there. He tilted a little at C. S. Calverley for demurring to God-gifted organ-voice of England. "I didn't mean it to be like your 'September, October, November'; I was imitating, not Horace, but the original Greek Alcaic, though Horace's is perhaps the finest metre." The two Latin metres which I have more than once heard him admire were the Hexameter and the Alcaic.