But in spite of vandalism, forgetfulness and barbarism, often of the worst description as in the mere indifference and ignorance that scattered Alfred’s bones, no one has ever come to Winchester without loving it, no one has ever been glad to get away.  Its innumerable visitors are all its lovers and the most opposite temperaments find here common ground at last.  Walpole praises it, and so does Keats.  “We removed here,” writes the latter in 1819 to Bailey, “for the convenience of a library, and find it an exceedingly pleasant town, enriched with a beautiful cathedral and surrounded by fresh-looking country....  Within these two months I have written fifteen hundred lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will probably see next winter.  I have written two tales, one from Boccaccio called the ‘Pot of Basil’ and another called ‘St Agnes Eve’ on a popular superstition, and a third called ‘Lamia’ (half-finished).  I have also been writing parts of my ‘Hyperion,’ and completed four acts of a tragedy.”

“This Winchester,” he writes again, “is a place tolerably well suited to me.  There is a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel ... and there is not one loom or anything like manufacturing beyond bread and butter in the whole city.  There are a number of rich Catholics in the place.  It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic place, and moreover it contains a nunnery.”  “I take a walk,” he writes to his family, “every day for an hour before dinner, and this is generally my walk; I go out the back gate, across one street into the cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway—­then I am on the other side of the building—­which, leaving behind me, I pass on through two college-like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of dean and prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass through one of the old city gates and then you are in College Street, through which I pass, and at the end thereof, crossing some meadows, and at last a country of alley gardens I arrive, that is my worship arrives, at the foundation of St Cross, which is a very interesting old place....  Then I pass across St Cross meadows till I come to the most beautiful clear river.”

That walk, or rather that over the meads to St Cross, is for every lover of Winchester that which he takes most often I think, that which comes to him first in every memory of the city.  Its beauty makes it sacred and its reward is an hour or more in what, when all is said, is one of the loveliest relics of the Middle Age anywhere left to us in England, I mean the hospital and church of St Cross in the meads of the Itchen.

Doubtless we are the heirs of the Ages, into our hearts and minds the Empire, the Middle Age and the Renaissance have poured their riches.  Doubtless we are the flower of Time and our Age, the rose of all the Ages.  That is why, in our wisdom, we have superseded such places as St Cross by our modern workhouses.