Born at Fairford, entered Corpus Christi, Oxford, in 1806, having obtained a scholarship, and was elected a Fellow of Oriel College in 1811. He was ordained in 1815, became a college tutor in 1818, and in 1825 accepted a curacy at Fairford. In 1831 he was elected Professor of Poetry in Oxford, and occupied that chair for ten years. During the term of his professorship he took a prominent part in the organization of the Tractarian movement, to which he was inclined by both his High Church views and personal interest in many of the leaders of that movement, especially in Hurrell Froude, who had been his favorite pupil at Fairford. In 1835 he was appointed to the vicarage of Hursley, which he held to the time of his death. In 1845 he had attempted to secure the foundation in Oxford of a “Poor Man’s College,” designed for the education of priests for the English Church; but the scheme was at the time wholly unsuccessful, except that a plot of land was purchased on the top of Headington Hill as a site. After his death, however, the project was revived, and pushed forward with great rapidity, and in 1870 Keble College Oxford, was opened as a memorial of him. In addition to numerous works in prose, he published “The Christian Year,” 1827; “Lyra Innocentium,” 1845; “Poems” (posthumously). He was also one of the contributors to the “Lyra Apostolica,” 1836.

Personal

  Talking of sacred poets, I hope you have read and often recur to the “Christian Year,” written by a most holy man, an acquaintance of mine at Oxford, Mr. Keble. He is a man the most meek, the most humble, and yet the most gifted with genius and learning, of any I ever met with. He went to Oxford at fourteen, and carried away all the honours and prizes; and lately refused to stand for the Headship of his College, though almost certain of succeeding, that he might be the comfort and support of his aged father, and relieve him from the cares of his parish by acting as his curate.

  He has the simplest and most childlike mind conceivable, playing with his nephew and a son of Davison’s on the shore, as if he had never a higher thought in his head than how he should make 2 boys happiest.

  I can hardly tell you what conversation was about; Keble lets everything take its course, and never sets any subject going of a continuous kind—probably would rather interfere with it if any one else did. You must not suppose by all this that I do not like K.’s manner or am disappointed. On the contrary, it really takes with me; only if I were a friend of his I should be afraid sometimes of others being offended by it and not understanding him.

  Nothing could be more simple and unaffected than his manner; and yet, in a word, it was as if George Herbert had risen from his grave, and were talking with me in a familiar way.

  Keble died lately—his wife a week after. His death moved me less than it once would, from his age, my own change of sentiment, and specially from his prominence of late in movements of persecuting repression, for which, indeed, he had always, or often, as in the Hampden case, betrayed a culpable inclination. Still, he was a master in his kind, and it was given to him to achieve, what few men do—one work of the highest excellency.

  I have received a printed letter, signed by your Grace, inviting me to contribute to the Keble Memorial. Under ordinary circumstances such an appeal would have been most congenial to my feelings of respect, and I may say of old affection, for Keble. I must confess that I have long wondered, not without some shame, and expressed my wonder (though not publicly), that, while the dignities and honours of the Church were lavished on many certainly not very distinguished men, no dignity, not even a barren honour, as far as I know, was ever bestowed on the author of the “Christian Year” and the editor of Hooker. I cannot but think that this is not to the credit of those who for nearly fifty years have had the disposal of those dignities and honours.

  The same devout mind which had done so much to restore the Church of England to the faith and zeal of former days, was ever active for good in the parish of Hursley. The sick were tended with loving care; the poor were helped in soul and body; the ignorant and ungodly were diligently sought after, warned, and instructed. Clubs and societies were formed for the good of the labouring classes; children were carefully and lovingly trained for God’s service…. He spared no pains to reclaim those who went astray, and to guide those who needed guidance. In many a dark winter’s night, after he had passed the usual span of man’s life, he would walk alone, with a lantern in his hand, to some distant part of the widely-scattered parish of Hursley to prepare a few of his flock for confirmation or communion. He would have one or two at a time for instruction, that he might teach them more impressively than he could with many together, and he would never grudge hours spent in repeating the same things over and over again to those who were dull and unapt in learning. If friends were staying with him whose society he wished to enjoy, still he cheerfully left them that he might attend to the poor lads who came to him for instruction.

  Keble had not regular features; he could not be called a handsome man, but he was one to be noticed anywhere, and remembered long; his forehead and hair beautiful in all ages; his eyes, full of play, intelligence and emotion, followed you while you spoke; and they lighted up, especially with pleasure, or indignation, as it might be, when he answered you.

  Once, if my memory serves, I remember to have seen him in the University pulpit at St. Mary’s, but his voice was not strong, and did not reach many of the audience…. All that was known of Keble at that time to the outer world of Oxford was vague and scanty. The few facts here added are taken from what has since been made public by two of his most attached friends, Sir John Coleridge and Dr. Newman, the former in his beautiful letters, memorial of Keble, the latter in his “Apologia.” Yet these facts, though few, are well worthy of attention, both because Keble’s character is more than his poetry, and because his poetry can only be rightly understood in the light of his character. For there is no poet whose poetry is more truly an image of the man himself, both in his inner nature and in his outward circumstances.

  Mr. Keble, the “sweet singer of Israel,” and a true saint, if this generation has seen one.

  A purer or more blameless character it would be impossible to imagine. Those who knew him best thought him almost faultless. To himself it seemed far otherwise. From early years to old age his life had been one which can only be described in the words of Scripture—he “walked with God.” This was evidently the secret and mainspring of all: and the result of that converse was, as it must ever be, humility. He was ever trying himself by the one perfect standard and finding himself deficient. An exquisitely sensitive modesty was natural to him; but this natural endowment had been refined and deepened into the corresponding Christian grace in its most perfect form. He had, indeed, humbled himself, and become as a little child. There was no effort, far less any affectation, in his constant rejection of all praise, and acknowledgment of sin and failure.

  I heard Keble’s Life read, but I felt it waterish. The entire want of any theology provokes me.

  It is not generally known that much of the poetry and tender human feeling of Mr. Keble’s life took its origin from this stay at Sidmouth. Yet, now that more than sixty years have passed away, it can violate no sanctities to reveal that the depths of his nature were stirred by one whose acquaintance he then first made; and though she was at that time very young, his interest in Cornelia Sarah Cornish, the sister of his friend, ripened in after days into a deep and tender, though rejected, love. One who knew well whereof he spoke, and who more than any had a right to speak of those dim, distant days, wrote: “I believe much of the pathos of the whole book—‘The Christian Year’—had its source in his love for her.” It is, indeed, impossible to read “The Christian Year” without being sure that the varied stops of human feeling had all been tuned and exercised before such true harmony of its kind flowed from his soul. It was this early love which called out such tenderness towards a younger Cornelia—or “Keenie”—Cornish, who became the wife of his nephew; and the chord once struck still sounded in these words, under date of 1840.

  To his immediate friends he was genial, affectionate, and possibly instructive, but he had no faculty for winning the unconverted. If he was not bigoted he was intensely prejudiced. If you did not agree with him there was something morally wrong with you, and your “natural man” was provoked into resistance. To speak habitually with authority does not necessarily indicate an absence of humility, but does not encourage the growth of that quality. If there had been no “movement,” as it was called, if Keble had remained a quiet country clergyman, unconscious that he was a great man, and uncalled on to guide the opinions of his age, he would have commanded perhaps more enduring admiration. The knot of followers who specially attached themselves to him show traces of his influence in a disposition not only to think the views which they hold sound in themselves, but to regard those who think differently as their intellectual inferiors. Keble was incapable of vanity in the vulgar sense. But there was a subtile self-sufficiency in him which has come out more distinctly in his school.

  Was always a shy man, and on the rare occasions on which he revisited Oxford, he preferred some quiet domestic hearth to Oriel commonroom…. Yet everybody who visited Oriel inquired after Keble, and expected to see him. It must be added that he was present in everybody’s thoughts, as a glory to the college, a comfort and a stay, for the slightest word he dropped was all the more remembered for there being so little of it, and from it seeming to come from a different and holier sphere. His manner of talking favoured this, for there was not much continuity in it, only every word was a brilliant or a pearl.

  Keble is undoubtedly to be looked upon as the flower of the Oxford movement—for in Newman the movement moved beyond itself. Keble’s theology, Keble’s churchmanship, Keble’s rectory and life and character, and the whole constitution of his mind, are the precise fulfillment of the Tractarian ideal. The intimate relation between his thought and character is striking. The character is certainly one of rare beauties; and let the thought have credit for all it can do. In that crowded and exciting time we think of no other whose life was so completely a mirror of his doctrine, and whose doctrine was so completely a mirror of his life, save only Arnold.

  Mr. Keble was the man on whom, if he had been resident at Oxford, and had not shrunk from all forms of self-assertion, the mantle of Newman would naturally have fallen. But he lived at Hursley, near Winchester; and though his influence was felt by many individual minds, most of them knew him chiefly as the author of the “Christian Year,” a book which reflected the uncontroversial side of his mind and opinions, and on some points did not reflect his later opinions at all. Those (and they were not few) who turned to him as their adviser and guide, did so generally by private correspondence for their own personal benefit, rather than as disciples in an intellectual school. He was, by affection and habit, strongly attached to the Church of England; modest in temperament, unaffectedly humble in spirit and manner, but firm as a rock within, with a strong and very tenacious grasp of the opinions which he took up. He did, I think, drift some considerable way from his original moorings; but his feeling for the church of his baptism and of his parents, and for his people and his pastoral work among them, was stronger than any influence which might have tended to draw him after Newman; though there were signs, as he grew older, of increasing sympathy with that line of thought which had landed Newman in Rome.

  He [Isaac Williams] had before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely new to him. Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without pride and without ambition. He saw the most distinguished academic of his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this man caring for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the great and the learned. He saw this man who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular—for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Æschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground. These pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, “always endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and acknowledged;” showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or show of it.

  He was humble and self-depreciatory almost to excess. This lowly sense of unworthiness, this penitential attitude of soul, was all the more prominent after the great troubles that overtook the Oxford movement. He felt, as it were, the chastening hand of God, and humbled himself beneath it. He used language about his own unworthiness that, to superficial persons, might appear either exaggerated or else significant of some grave shortcomings. In some of his letters to Newman this was so prominent that, before they were handed over for publication, the Cardinal erased certain sentences, lest, as he said, they should be misunderstood and create an entirely wrong impression…. As a preacher, Keble could be learned and scholarly before a University congregation. But he set himself deliberately to speak with simple plainness of thought and language to his village flock. He did not shrink from bringing before them the highest truths of Christianity. He explained fully, yet very simply, the sacraments of the church, and the great fundamental doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement. But he more and more brought himself to use homely illustrations, taken from the daily life of his hearers, to convey to them the deep lessons of the gospel.

The Christian Year, 1827

  I have Keble lying open before me. The hymns for the holy week are beautiful,—Monday is exquisite: I think that I like it best of them all. The use made of Andromache’s farewell is quite filling to the heart, and the theology of the fourth stanza, “Thou art as much his care,” etc., is worth, in my mind, the whole Shorter and Longer Catechisms together.

  The “Christian Year” made its appearance in 1827. It is not necessary, and scarcely becoming, to praise a book which has already become one of the classics of the language. When the general tone of religious literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that time, Keble struck an original note, and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school long unknown in England. Nor can I pretend to analyse, in my own instance, the effect of religious teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful. I have never till now tried to do so, yet I think I am not wrong in saying that the two main intellectual truths which it brought home to me were the same two which I had learned from Butler (in his “Analogy”), though recast in the creative mind of my new master. The first of these was what may be called, in a large sense of the word, the sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen.

  If we were asked to assign in a few words the causes of the great power which the “Christian Year” has exercised over such different classes of readers, we should say that Mr. Keble has done for religious poetry what Wordsworth did for poetry in general. First, he has shown us, what many were beginning to doubt, that poetry is a requirement, or at all events a high enjoyment of, the religious mind; and secondly, that it is limited to no one class of feelings, or language, or doctrines. Writing himself under the influence of a distinctly theological and orthodox spirit, he has yet understood the still higher art of touching those springs of moral and religious feeling which lie deep in the hearts of all good Christians, whatever their creed; and in the temper of a higher Master he has made everything in nature,—the flowers of the field, our homes and paths, the very “murky lanes” of our cities,—dear to the religious heart. It is this simplicity and reality which has made him the favourite, as Wordsworth became, of all thoughtful and cultivated minds, and emphatically the religious poet of the age. Men of the most opposite convictions have drawn an almost daily inspiration from his writings; and he has been the teacher, the domestic companion, almost the religious philosopher, alike of Arnold, of Newman, and of Robertson…. It is chiefly as the poet of the religious affections, of God’s love to man and man’s answering love to God, that Mr. Keble seems to us unrivalled, at once in the depth and beauty of feeling which he displays, and the manner in which he connects this feeling with everything in nature and life. Here again we believe that it is no mere fancy to say that he is the poet of his time, and has remarkably met its wants, and even supplied an important link of its religious philosophy, by the power with which he has made us realize the personal love of “One unseen, yet ever nigh.”

  If there is one quality which more than any other may be said to mark his writings, it is their intense and absolute veracity. Never for a moment is the very truth sacrificed to effect. I will venture to say with confidence that there is not a sentiment to be found elevated or amplified beyond what he really felt, nor, I would add, even an epithet that goes beyond his actual and true thought. What he was in life and character, that he was transparently in every line he wrote—entirely, always, reverentially true.

  It stands alone in literature; for though George Herbert’s poems and Bishop Heber’s hymns each present some points of resemblance, we should be inclined to rate Herbert far higher as a poet, and Heber far lower. Herbert’s verse can only be read with pleasure when the mind is attuned to feelings of personal devotion in which none others can share: Heber’s hymns can be sung by mixed congregations: while “The Christian Year” fits itself to the closet or the drawing-room, not to singing in church; can be read aloud, when to read Herbert were profanation; can be enjoyed for its poetry by those who object to its theology; while its theology has gained an admission for poetic thoughts into the minds of many wooden-headed people.

  It taught because his own soul was moved so deeply; the stream burst forth, because the heart which poured it out was full; it was fresh, deep, tender, and loving because himself was such; it disclosed to souls secrets which they knew not, but could not fail to own when known, because it was so true, and thought aloud: and conscience everywhere responded to the voice of conscience.

  The force of the book lies in its sincerity. Its music is the music of a well-harmonized life; the devotion is real; the quiet sense of nature is real. There are no tricks of style, though there are no flashes of genius. Keble laid stress on the authority and customs of the church; he was what in the language of party is called a high churchman; but the true man, whichever his side and whatever his cause, belongs to all and is a help to all.

  High Churchmanship has been hitherto dry and formal; Keble carried into it the emotions of Evangelicalism while he avoided angry collision with Evangelical opinions. Thus all parties could find much to admire in him, and little to suspect. English religious poetry was generally weak—was not, indeed, poetry at all. Here was something which in its kind was excellent; and every one who was really religious, or wished to be religious, or even outwardly and from habit professed himself and believed himself to be a Christian, found Keble’s verses chime in his heart like church bells.

  It is by the “Christian Year” that Keble won the ear of the religious world, and will retain it. It was a happy thought that dictated the plan of the book, to furnish a meditative religious lyric for each Sunday of the year, and for each saint’s day and festival of the English Church…. 1. The peculiar tone of religious feeling that pervades it, at once deep, pure, and tender, sober, and severely self-denying…. 2. A second note of the “Christian Year” is reverence for the church, and for the pastoral office within it,—a solemn sense of its dignity and its awful responsibility…. 3. A third note is the strong and tender affection for home and friends, the filial and fraternal piety, which everywhere pervades it…. 4. A prevailing spirit of modesty and of delicate reserve, very unlike the vanity with which poets are often credited. Combined with this is a special tenderness for those persons and things which the world thinks least of—for those who pine forgotten in hidden nooks, for the downtrodden and the despised…. 5. Besides these qualities of Keble’s heart as a man, there are others which belong to him especially as a poet. Prominent among these is his love of nature, particularly for the more ordinary and unnoticed features of English landscape.

  His poetic and gracious gifts are embalmed in the “Christian Year,” which has touched so many hearts. There is an ineffable sweetness in its verse. Christian experience may outgrow the savor, but it lingers like a delightful fragrance in the memory.

  Perhaps the best test of the “accurate learning” displayed by Mr. Keble is to be found in the extremely small number of lapses amongst a crowd of beautiful fitnesses and coincidences. Indeed, after the conscientious correction of one or two minute errors in later editions, there remains scarcely a drawback to the exact and admirable descriptions, allusive or in detail, strewn throughout the “Christian Year;” and the charmed reader may repose in the conviction that he is under the influence of a picture as faithful as it is graceful of any scene with which the several narratives or meditations are conversant.

  Who will dare to say that the “Christian Year” is not a true, perhaps a great poetical work? It has carried hope and happiness and support to hearts that cannot be numbered; but it says little or nothing to me. Poetry has been somewhere or other called “idealised utterance.” I do not quite understand this definition (definitions of poetry indeed are always more or less unintelligible), but accepting it as an approach to the truth, and judging Keble by that definition, I should say that he commonly stammered rather than spoke. But yet, his power of influencing beautiful souls, and filling them with unfading joy and peace, is so great a gift, that to talk of him without due reverence seems something like a blasphemy.

  The “Christian Year” was published anonymously in two volumes in 1827. His father’s desire to see it in print before he died partly gave the impulse. No one, and least of all Keble himself, anticipated its great success. Before his death it had passed through ninety-five editions and by the next year the number had reached 109. The editions contained three thousand and even five thousand copies; nor is there yet any sign of the decline of its popularity. Keble said that he aimed at bringing men’s thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with the prayer-book. The suggestiveness of the book, the writer’s intimate knowledge of the Bible and power of presenting its most poetic incidents, the accuracy of its descriptions of natural scenery, the sweetness of its melody, the happiness of its general diction and particular expressions, its exquisite taste, its scholarly tone, its beautiful spirit of unaffected piety, were all appreciated. Its defects were also recognised from the first. Its ruggedness of metre and awkwardness of construction in some parts were so marked that the poet Wordsworth (Dr. Pusey tells us) “proposed to the author that they should go over the work together with a view to correcting the English.” Its obscurity was also complained of. But it was favorably received even by those who did not share its author’s views.

  Certainly the language of Homer has inspired some of the best poems of the “Christian Year.” Or was it Scott, to whom he goes back so frequently in the “Prælectiones,” and of whom he speaks so lovingly in his review of Lockhart’s life? Certainly either Homer with his idealization of the heroic age, or Scott with that of the age of chivalry, would kindle his own love of the recollections of childhood or the glories of the early Church, though the very sense of such dependence would keep him on his guard against direct imitation of their form. In the earlier poems, indeed, Southey’s influence of form and thought is perceptible, and in a less degree that of Scott and Wordsworth, but he had shaken himself free and has a style that is independent and entirely his own in the “Christian Year.” It is marred from time to time by want of smoothness of metre, by obscurity in the connection of the thought between verse and verse, but on the whole it is spontaneous, melodious, and clear…. Its most permanent value lies in this power to soothe…. The poems awe and stir and soothe alike, because they are so real; they have so vivid a sense of the spiritual world, with all its terrors as well as its beauty and grace. He is the prophet of the fear of God no less than the poet of His love.

  With its poetry, so good within its own range, so weak beyond it, was the source of many books of poems of a similar but inferior character.

  Keble’s evening hymn has far outstripped in general use his morning hymn. Although the “Christian Year” has gone through one hundred editions, the last of which placed the bulk of it before one hundred thousand readers, this hymn is known not to thousands, but to millions, and the music of its verse is familiar in every nook and corner of the English-speaking world.

General

  Mr. Keble, for example, has translated him for women; he has himself told us that he owed to Wordsworth the tendency ad sanctiora which is the mark of his own writings; and in fact he has but adapted the tone and habit of reverence, which his master applied to common objects and the course of the seasons, to sacred objects and the course of the ecclesiastical year,—diffusing a mist of sentiment and devotion altogether delicious to a gentle and timid devotee.

  I do not expect a general agreement in opinion with me, when I say that the “Lyra Innocentium,” if not equal to the “Christian Year,” as a whole, is at least more than equal in some parts, and on the whole worthy of its author. Though very successful in comparison with the generality of such works, it has not had a circulation at all proportionate to that of the “Christian Year;” it has not become a manual in general use, and has not consequently been studied, and is not known in the same degree. I may therefore be excused a few words upon it…. No one, perhaps, but a parent, can fully enter into all parts of it, and yet he who wrote it did not marry young, and was never a father.

  There can be no doubt that Keble had, in even an eminent degree, some of the higher qualities which make the true poet. His fancy was lively and fertile in images full of beauty. His observation of outward nature, such as it may be seen in the rich lowlands of England was accurate; and his feeling for the quiet and tender beauty of grove and stream, and field and English wild flowers was exquisitely quick and true. His sympathy with all that is pure and sweet in home affections, with the joys and sorrows of family life, with the ways and the feelings of children, was almost unequalled. His deep personal piety harmonized all these natural endowments, and cast upon all he saw and felt those solemn lights and shades from the world above and beyond, which glorified the play of natural fancy and feeling, gave it unity and purpose, and often elevated his poetry into the region of imagination as distinguished from the lower province of mere fancy. He had learnt, too, from Cowper and Wordsworth in England, and from the early poets of ancient Greece, whom he loved so well, to express his thought by preference directly and truthfully, avoiding artificial “poetic diction.”

  This edition of Hooker occupied him five years, from 1831 to 1836. Of all his prose works the introduction to this edition seems to us far the ablest. It shows great critical power both in the minuter questions which concern the authenticity of certain portions of the ecclesiastical policy, and in the broader subject of what Hooker’s real opinions were upon the turning points of the long controversy he held with the puritan writers, and what the influences were by which they were shaped. This was a work to which his whole heart was given. For though he would call no man master, not even Richard Hooker, and where they differed stated with all boldness and sincerity the difference and its cause, yet he could not but perceive in Hooker’s times of opposition and reproach that which shadowed forth to his inner consciousness the likeness of his own work in his own generation. This consciousness often re-appears in his pages, and adds a most life-like reality to them.

  He was a poet; he was a man of eminent goodness; and he was a great Christian thinker and theologian. Of these characters the first has mainly riveted the attention of the world. The name of the author of the “Christian Year” is known to thousands who know nothing, whatever they may infer, about his life and character. And a scarcely smaller number who are aware that he was a man of singular purity and simplicity of life have no idea that his intellect was one of unusual strength and beauty, and that he wielded decisive influence at a crisis pregnant with consequences to the religious future of his country. “The poet Keble!” The phrase is used, often indeed as a title of honour, but sometimes also to imply that he was only a maker of religious verses, and not properly a leader or guide of men.

  Keble was not a sacred, but in the best sense of the word, a secular poet. It is not David only, but the Sibyl, whose accents we catch in his inspirations. The “sword in myrtle drest” of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, “the many-twinkling smile of ocean” from Æschylus, are images as familiar to him as “Bethlehem’s glade,” or “Carmel’s haunted strand.” Not George Herbert, or Cowper, but Wordsworth, Scott, and perhaps more than all, Southey, are the English poets that kindled his flame, and coloured his diction. The beautiful stanza, “Why so stately, maiden fair?” and the whole poem on “May Garlands,” might have been written by the least theological of men…. Though Keble’s pastoral life was retired and his ecclesiastical life narrow, as a poet he not only touched the great world of literature, but he was also a free-minded, free-speaking thinker. Both in form and in doctrine his poetry has a broad and philosophical vein, the more striking from its contrasts to his opposite tendencies in connection with his ecclesiastical party.

  His poetry was for a long time only for himself and his intimate friends; his indulgence in poetical composition was partly playful, and it was not till after much hesitation on his own part and also on theirs, and with a contemptuous undervaluing of his work, which continued to the end of his life, that the anonymous little book of poems was published which has since become familiar wherever English is read, as the “Christian Year.” His serious interests were public ones. Though living in the shade, he followed with anxiety and increasing disquiet the changes which went on so rapidly and so formidably, during the end of the first quarter of this century, in opinion and in the possession of political power.

  After 1840, when the craving for spiritual guidance came to be widely felt, many turned to the elderly author of the “Christian Year.” They were met with the most embarrassing condescension, the tenderest sympathy, and sure and ready insight; they were not led to make any great venture or scale any great heights; he did not attempt to impose or inspire the very considerable austerities which he practised; his guidance was often hesitating and never peremptory. Probably most who trusted him enough to persevere in acting on his hints did learn to possess their souls in patience, to expend their emotions in safe ways, and in some measure to purify their hearts. His self-depreciation did not affect his happiness or the esteem of two generations. He was loved and honored to the last, though he lived to call himself a testy old clerk. Perhaps he will be remembered, like Shelley, as “a beautiful ineffectual angel;” but Keble’s wings were never smirched.

  If his writings were not poetry, we may be thankful that for more than half a century there have been spirits so high, so refined, so devoted, as to have been misled by his spiritual ardour, the lofty sublimity of his ideals, as to mistake his refined and enthusiastic utterance for the voice of the genuine bard.

  Keble has a deeper strain of thought than Lyte; he is in closer harmony with Wordsworth; and the rare fragments of landscape which his train of subjects has admitted are worthy of the Master—true to Nature, dignified, instinct with serious thought and feeling.

  With Herbert and Miss Rossetti, Keble ranks as the greatest of English writers in sacred verse, the irregular and unequal efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw sometimes transcending, oftener sinking below the three. If Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of Christina Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while he escapes the quaint triviality or the triviality sometimes not even quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth is strongly shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely original manner. The lack of taste which mars so much religious poetry never shows itself even for a moment in Keble; yet the correctness of his diction, like the orthodoxy of his thought is never frigid or tame. There are few poets who so well deserve the nickname of a Christian Horace, though the phrase may seem to have something of the paradox of “prose Shakespeare.” The careful melody of the versification and the exact felicity of the diction exclude, it may be, those highest flights which create most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure, proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has few superiors.

  Notwithstanding drawbacks, however, Keble stands admittedly among the foremost of the sacred poets of the century, and he does so by reason of his superior poetic equipment. Many writers of sacred verse employ poetic forms for didactic purposes, because they find them effective for inculcating doctrine and disseminating truth: they are churchmen first and poets afterwards. But Keble was much more than a writer of hymns and poems upon sacred subjects. Nature made him a poet, and circumstances made him a churchman; and had circumstances predisposed him otherwise he would still have been a poet, and might still have won distinction by his verse.

  Keble’s influence was essentially personal, and was due to his saintly life more than to anything he wrote, even in poetry. The Tractarian movement took its rise in a longing for saintliness, of which Keble furnished a living example. He was not to any considerable extent an originator of theory. Certain germs of theory about the church, about its relation to pre-Reformation times, about authority in religion, were in the air and they became absorbed in Keble’s system. But his was not a creative mind, and his disposition at the head of the Anglo-Catholic movement was little more than an accident. He was like a child who by a thrust of his hand sends a finely-poised rock thundering down a hill. In his literary aspects he is disappointing. A brilliant boy and a most blameless man, he remains throughout too little of this world. The pale perfection of his life is reflected in his works. He would have been better had he been less good; he would have been much better had he been less feminine.

  The charm of Keble’s best poetry lies chiefly in its purity, its serenity, its deep transparency of thought and feeling, its calmness of expression, its consoling spirit. His theory was that “the utterance of high or tender feeling, controlled or modified by a certain reserve, is the very soul of poetry.” His imagination is illuminating rather than creative; in this he differs from Henry Vaughan, to whom in many things he is so near of kin. Of fancy, and of that striking, inventive power of expression which usually goes with fancy, he has little or nothing; in this he differs from his brother preacher-poet, George Herbert. In broad, buoyant, vigorous emotion, such as finds an utterance in the noblest hymns, wherein we hear the sound of many voices triumphantly praising God, Keble was deficient; he was too reflective, too secluded in spirit, to be among the great hymn-writers. Keble’s real master in poetry—though he himself gave the highest praise and admiration to Scott among the moderns—his real master was Wordsworth.