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THE THREE MARYS AT CASTLE HOWARD, IN 1812 AND 1837.

The lifeless son--the mother's agony,
O'erstrained till agony refused to feel—

That sinner too I then dry-eyed could see;
For I was hardened in my selfish weal,

And strength and joy had strung my soul with steel.

I knew not then what man may live to be,

A thing of life, that feels he lives in vain-
A taper, to be quenched in misery!
Forgive me, then, Caracci! if I seek

To look on this, thy tale of tears, again;
For now the swift is slow, the strong is weak.
Mother of Christ! how merciful is pain!
But if I longer view thy tear-stained cheek,
Heart-broken Magdalen! my heart will break.

PLAINT.

Dark, deep, and cold the current flows
Unto the sea where no wind blows,
Seeking the land which no one knows.

O'er its sad gloom still comes and goes
The mingled wail of friends and foes,
Borne to the land which no one knows.

Why shrieks for help yon wretch, who goes
With millions, from a world of woes,
Unto the land which no one knows?

Though myriads go with him who goes,
Alone he goes where no wind blows,
Unto the land which no one knows.

For all must go where no wind blows,
And none can go for him who goes;
None, none return whence no one knows.

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Yet why should he who shrieking goes
With millions, from a world of woes,
Reunion seek with it or those?

Alone with God, where no wind blows,
And Death, his shadow-doomed, he goes:
That God is there the shadow shows.

Oh, shoreless Deep, where no wind blows! And, thou, oh, Land which no one knows! That God is All, His shadow shows.

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[JOHN KEBLE was born on St. Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire. He was elected Scholar of Corpus, Oxford, in his fifteenth, and Fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year. After a few years of tutorship at Oxford and curacy in the country, he became Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire in 1839, where he continued to minister till his death in 1866. He was with Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey regarded as forming the Triumvirate of the Oxford Catholic movement. His prose works consist of an elaborate edition of Hooker, a careful Life of Bishop Wilson, and various theological treatises. But it is as a poet much more than a scholar or a controversialist that he is known; and of his poetical works, the Lyra Innocentium, the Translation of the Psalter, a posthumous volume of Poems, and The Christian Year (1827), it is by the last that he acquired an universal and undying fame in English literature. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he wrote in Latin Praelections on Poetry, which are remarkable both for their subtlety and their exquisite Latinity.

His Life was written by his friend Mr. Justice Coleridge.]

Keble was not merely, like Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley, a writer of hymns. He was a real poet. Their works, no doubt, have occasional flashes of poetry, but their main object is didactic, devotional, theological. Not so the Christian Year, the Lyra Innocentium, or the Psalter. Very few of his verses can be used in public worship. His hymns are the exception. His originality lies in the fact that whilst the subjects which he touches are for the most part consecrated by religious usage or Biblical allusion, yet he grasps them not chiefly or exclusively as a theologian, or a Churchman, but as a poet. The Lyra Innocentium, whilst its more limited range of subjects, and perhaps its more subtle turn of thought, will always exclude it from the rank occupied by the

1 The bulk of this notice appeared in the writer's Essays on Church and State.

Christian Year, has more of the true fire of genius, more of the true rush of poetic diction. The Psalter again differs essentially from Sternhold and Hopkins, Tate and Brady, not merely in execution, but in design. It is the only English example of a rendering of Hebrew poetry by one who was himself a poet, with the full appreciation of the poetical thought as well as of the spiritual life which lies enshrined in the deep places of the Psalter. A striking instance of this is the version of the 93rd Psalm. The general subject of that Psalm must be obvious to every one in any translation, however meagre. But it required the magic touch of a kindred spirit to bring out of the rugged Hebrew sentences the splendour and beauty of the dashing and breaking waves, which doubtless was intended, though shrouded in that archaic tongue from less keen observers.

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. The allusions to nature are even superabundantly inwoven with the most sacred subjects. Occasionally a thought of much force and sublimity is lost by its entanglement in some merely passing phase of cloud or shadow. The descriptions of natural scenery display a depth of poetical intuition very rarely vouchsafed to any man. The exactness of the descriptions of Palestine, which he had never visited, have been noted and verified on the spot, as very few such descriptions ever have been. There are not above two or three failures, even in turns of expression. One example of this minute accuracy is so striking as to deserve special record. Amongst the features of the Lake of Gennesareth, one which most arrests the attention is the belt of oleanders which surrounds its shores. this remarkable characteristic had, as far as we know, entirely escaped the observation of all travellers before the beginning of this century; and, if we are not mistaken, the first published notice of it was in that line of the Christian Year

But

'All through the summer night,

Those blossoms 1 red and bright-'

by one who had never seen them, and who must have derived his knowledge of them from careful cross-examination of some traveller from the Holy Land. It was an instance of his curious shyness that, when complimented on this singular accuracy of description of the Holy Land, he replied, 'It was by a happy accident.' Not less precise, if we knew exactly where to look for the original spots which suggested them, are his descriptions of the scenery of England. With the single exception of the allusion to the rocky isthmus at the Land's End said to be found in the lines,

'Lo, on a narrow neck of land,

'Twixt two unbounded seas I stand,'

there is probably no local touch through the whole of the poems of the two Wesleys. But Oxford, Bagley Wood, and the neighbourhood of Hursley, might, we are sure, be traced through hundreds of lines, both in the Christian Year and the Lyra Innocentium.

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 contrast to his opposite tendencies in connexion with his ecclesiastical party.

That eagerness to give the local colour of the sacred events, which runs through these volumes, is the 'first step which costs everything' in the attempt to treat these august topics historically, and not dogmatically.

'The rude sandy lea,

Where stately Jordan flows by many a palm-'

'Green lake, and cedar tuft, and spicy glade,
Shaking their dewy tresses now the storm is laid ;'

'The cell

In Kedron's storied dell;'

1 In all the early editions these were in a note erroneously called ‘rhododendron.' It was not till after his attention had been called to it, that, we think in the 72nd edition, it was altered to 'oleander.'

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