It needs no education, not even any imagination, to appreciate the change.

It is not necessary to know that great scholars inhabited the place, to recall any name or any man's career.

The appeal is not to a recollected impression of the Middle Ages, or indeed of any past, remote or near.

It is the spirit of scholarship itself, abstract, intangible, which creates this atmosphere.
Knowledge, a severe goddess, awes while she beckons.
Hyacinth Conneally had submitted himself to such emotions time after time when, fresh from the wilds of Connemara, he made his way to the examination-hall, an outside student in a borrowed cap and gown.

Now, when for the first time he entered into the actual life of the college, could look up at windows of rooms that were his own, and reckon on his privilege of fingering tomes from the shelves of the huge library, the spirit of the place awed him anew.