Those old battlemented walls around
the quadrangles; many gables; the windows with stone pavilions, so very
antique, yet some of them adorned with fresh flowers in pots,--a very
sweet contrast; the ivy mantling the gray stone; and the infinite repose,
both in sunshine and shadow,--it is as if half a dozen bygone centuries
had set up their rest here, and as if nothing of the present time ever
passed through the deeply recessed archway that shuts in the College from
the street. Not but what people have very free admittance; and many
parties of young men and girls and children came into the gardens while
we were there.
These gardens of New College are indescribably beautiful,--not gardens in
an American sense, but lawns of the richest green and softest velvet
grass, shadowed over by ancient trees, that have lived a quiet life here
for centuries, and have been nursed and tended with such care, and so
sheltered from rude winds, that certainly they must have been the
happiest of all trees. Such a sweet, quiet, sacred, stately seclusion--
so age-long as this has been, and, I hope, will continue to be--cannot
exist anywhere else. One side of the garden wall is formed by the
ancient wall of the city, which Cromwell's artillery battered, and which
still retains its pristine height and strength. At intervals, there are
round towers that formed the bastions; that is to say, on the exterior
they are round towers, but within, in the garden of the College, they are
semicircular recesses, with iron garden-seats arranged round them.
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