Harvard Rhodes Scholar Writes Contemporary Oxford Articles

Below is the first of a series of six articles on Oxford University, England, written especially for the Crimson by Andrew Vincent Corry '27, of Butte, Montana, now in his second year at Merton College, Oxford, as Rhodes Scholar from Montana. The remaining five article will appear daily in the Crimson.

Corry graduated from Harvard College with a magna in his field of English Literature. He was a member of the Harvard Glee Club, the Harvard instrumental Clubs, the Debating Union, and the Phillips Brooks House Association. He spent a year here during graduate work in geological engineering, and is now perfecting himself in that field in England.

The American who comes to Oxford at the beginning of Michaelmas Term is likely to wonder why this damp and draughty meeting-place of wintry winds and rains was ever chosen for the seat of a university. While Oxford cannot boast of the yellow, strangling fogs which infest London and turn her days into hideous night, she can offer a specimen of a sort no less disagreeable to newcomers. For a few hours at least during these quiet winter days, a thick white layer is apt to fill the bowl which the Isis and the Cherwell have made between Cumnor, Boars' Hill, and Shot-over. The dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the spires and towers of St. Mary the Virgin's, Magdalen, Merton, and the Cathedral are lost in the lower reaches of this fog-bank. The streets are shining with wet; the Old Schools Quadrangle is black and forbidding; the various College and University buildings look like the cubic masses of a modern stage-setting. The purlieus of St. Aldate's are wrapped in gloom. Only the most intrepid explorer would venture into labyrinthine Hell Passage, or attempt to thread the intricacies of Logic Lane. It is the open season for colds and chills, and everyone must take to the fields for games if he wishes to withstand the weather. The fields are a sodden green. Every afternoon hundreds come back from their Rugger games muddier and scarcely drier than the rowing men. It is not to be wondered at, then, that the weather forms the first staple of conversation at Oxford; that it is, in fact, the first of a number of interests which the Englishman and the foreigner find in common at Oxford. The part which the weather plays in fostering Anglo-American friendship is not to be underestimated!

Weather an Incubus

I have begun these brief sketches of Oxford impressions with the weather, because it is one of the most striking and persistent of first impressions at Oxford. I have seen freshmen very depressed and lonely chiefly because of the weather. It is the first real obstacle to feeling at home in Oxford. Once one has taken proper steps to surmount this obstacle, one has gone a good way towards becoming a good Oxonian. English education owes much to the weather, because English character owes much to the English climate.

A few glorious days of brilliant sunshine during the Hillary Term at Lent gladden the winter-worn spirits of Oxford freshmen, and for the first time the promise of beauty seems near to realization. For it is in Trinity Term that Oxford blooms with unbelievable richness. She is most easily appreciated then set in the rich green of meadows and fields by two beautiful rivers, now covered with punts and canoes; old trees line the roads and walks, the air is sweet and clear and fresh, and the Colleges sparkle in the sunshine. It is now that one knows the High is the finest street in Europe, and that Troy could never have been more beautiful than this old city and its ancient University