382 PRÆTERITA-II

or sailors only; and so admirable to me that I have never been able, since those Woolwich times, to gather myself up against the national guilt of war, seeing that such men were made by the discipline of it.¹

But at Mr. Dale’s were also two senior pupils, little known to me except, Henry Dart by his large hazel eyes, and Edmund Oldfield by his already almost middle-aged aspect of serene sagacity. When I went to Oxford, I found Dart at Exeter College, where we established poetical friendship, and contended in all honour for the Newdigate, reading our best passages to each other, for improving censure. Dart, very deservedly, won it that year,² and gave promise of generous distinction afterwards; but the hazel eyes were too bright, and closed, in a year or two, to this world’s ambition.

152. I do not know how it chanced that the art impulse which animated Edmund Oldfield’s grave sagacity did not manifest itself to me till much later. He was the elder brother of a large group of clever lads and lasses, amiable in the extreme, yet in a slightly severe and evangelical manner; whose father was in some tangible relation to mine as one of the leading men of business on the Hill; their mother known to us by sight only, as a refined and still beautiful woman,-evangelical without severity; both of them occupying, with such of their children as were that way minded, the pew before us in Mr. Burnet’s chapel, whereat sometimes in my younger days we went to hear a gloomier divinity than that of my beloved and Anacreontic Doctor Andrews.³

153. We might never have known more of them, unless, among the sacred enthusiasms of Camberwell parish, the fancy had arisen to put a painted window into the east end of the pretty church, just built for it by Mr. Gilbert

¹ [Compare Crown of Wild Olive, §§ 85 seq. (Vol. XVIII. pp. 459 seq.).]

² [In 1838; for Ruskin’s poem sent in on that occasion, “The Exile of St. Helena,” see Vol. II. p. 45. For some remarks by Ruskin on his poem which won the prize in the following year, see the Appendix; below, p. 614.]

³ [See above, i. § 81 (p. 74).]

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