Turn off the High into any side-street, and you have the same character on a more intimate scale. Here you are in the shade between the tall, severe side of Queen's and a few private houses in the then-typical Great Western chocolate-and-cream paint. The front of St. Edmund Hall is just opposite [the] apse of Queen's Chapel.

And the apse, in its roundness and smoothness, contrasts with St. Peter's standing at the end of the vista, square and rough, and with trees and bushes around, whereas Queen's is wholly man-shaped with no vegetation intruding anywhere.

By the church, the lane narrows and starts twisting.

The church tower faces a late-Stuart front with a more pronounced and lively relief than Wren or Aldrich or Hawksmoor would have tolerated. The rhythm sets off the bluntness of the tower.

A sharp turn, and we enter a stretch of no other than accidental picturesque affect. The flaking-off stones of Queen's and the garden wall behind, and the forbidding black wall of the back buildings of New College.

A gentle bend, and behind the leafage of Queen's we get a glimpse of Hawksmoor's Gothick and Gibbs's Roman-Baroque dome, and then a lower Gothick gable comes into the field of vision.

It is the gable of the Codrington Library of All Souls, an odd frontage to an Italian room, and shown up to perfection by Sir Thomas G. Jackson's companion-piece, the [Chapel] of Hertford College—a master work of design in the spirit of variety. It is worth following in detail the similarities and the differences between the two, with their triplet windows and their gables of moderate pitch. They appear as on a stage, too; for the lane seems to widen here, as the buildings of New College recede on the right and give place to a strip of orchard.

After this flash of lively picturesque interest, of display and breadth, the scene shrinks again. Another turn, and we are in the back street of a small market-town. The bridge drives us on. A bridge across a street is always the greatest temptation to explore beyond.

And there is indeed surprise behind it, though no pleasant surprise. The next stretch, after another turn of ninety degrees, is between prison walls. The entrance to New College we don't see; it is behind us, and in front is not much promise of an escape. The chimney appears asymmetrical on the wall between the windows, though it isn't.

Yet another turn, the fourth, and we experience an almost irritating change of atmosphere. There in front of us, below laburnum, stands a brick house in its garden, prim and comfortable. It might be at St. Albans or Warwick or anywhere. The lane turns back to its prior direction almost immediately and returns us to the Oxford scene. Hertford College walls left and right, and Jackson's brilliant Bridge connecting them.

It is fine in section and in detail; that is seen in dark shadow or clear light, and what comes out beyond it is worth so sumptuous a frame.

An Oxford forum with the Bodleian, square and pinnacled on the left; the Clarendon Building, massive in block-shape and detail on the right; and the oddly unbalanced side-view of Wren's Sheldonian in the front. The view, framed as it now appears, is an epitome of Oxford planning: monumental in its elements, but full of contrasts in their arrangement or the way they have grown together.