I take a walk every day for an hour before dinner, and this is generally my walk. I go out the back gate across one street into the Cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the Cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway--then I am on the other side of the building, which leaving behind me, I pass on through two College-like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of Deacons and Prebendaries, furnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass through one of the old city gates and then you are in one College Street, through which I pass, and at the end thereof crossing some meadows, and at last a country alley of gardens, I arrive at the foundation of St. Cross, which is a very interesting old place, both for its Gothic tower and Alms square and also for the appropriation of its rich rents to a relation of the Bishop of Winchester. Then I pass over St. Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river. Now this is only one mile of my walk.[5] Another clue, which locates the house very close to the High Street, if not in it, is given by the following: We heard distinctly a noise patting down the High Street as of a walking cane of the good old Dowager breed, and a little minute after we heard a less voice observe, “What a noise the ferril made--it must be loose.”[6] Winchester streets are less staid and genteel now, and the High Street would hardly echo responsive to such repressed sounds to-day. Two months only the visit lasted, months of tense compression and rich utterance of song. _Hyperion_ (which he never finished), _Lamia_, _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_--all these in one form or other came under his pen for completion or revision, while his _Ode to Autumn_, the most perfect of all his odes, was wholly a Winchester production inspired by his circumstances and surroundings. The German poet might almost have had Keats prophetically before him when he sang: Singst du nicht dein ganzes Leben, Sing doch in der Jugend Drang! Nur im Blüthenmond erheben Nachtigallen ihren Sang. E’en though after years be silent, Sing while youthful passions throng, Only in the fervid spring-time Nightingales pour forth their song. But no after years, alas! were to succeed, and Keats’s fervid ‘Blüthenmond’ was all his allotted span. Winchester is happy in the memory of his eventful connection with her, brief in time though it was. Our next name is Thackeray, who seems to have loved to locate his scenes in our city and neighbourhood, though in general his references have too little local colour to permit of identification--assuming, that is, that any such local image was really intended.