I cannot take my eyes from an old watercolor of Oxford, her many spires rising in the checkered sunlight above the lush verdure of meadows and hills. Pastoral landscape and ancient town are caught in perfect equipoise, the greens of the tree tops encircling the muted greys of the myriad towers and pinnacles of the University, ‘green shouldering grey,’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrased it.1 John Wycliffe, the great early translator of the Bible, called Oxford ‘the Vineyard of the Lord.’ For a millennium the town and the university which rose from its center have figured as a kind of urban Eden in the English imagination.

But by the mid-nineteenth century, Oxford had become an endangered Eden, increasingly blighted by industrialization and suburbanization, and fragmented as an ideal site where faith and reason, spirit and intellect, nature and architecture had once harmoniously joined in one spot. For successive generations Oxford had a way of profoundly and lastingly affecting her graduates, a disproportionate number of whom rose to high position in the Anglican Church and in government. In the world of literature, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins all fell under Oxford's spell. ‘Beautiful city!’ Arnold apostrophized a quarter of a century after first seeing her spires: