From thine own lays so simply beautiful That might have won the sceptic's sullen heart Of Him who died for us upon the cross. Yea! oft when thou wert well, and in the calm Who looked upon thee, with those gentlest smiles Of death and burial, and the silent tomb." Sepulchral in outward aspect as one marked for death, Grahame had the freshest life within him. Of the days when he began his career as a barrister his friend wrote "Yet even then, Thy life was ever such as well became One whose pure soul was fixed upon the Cross! That man would teach the saving words of Heaven!" He The pure spirit of the writer adds an untaught grace to Grahame's poem on the Sabbath. describes a Sabbath morning in the country, the sound of the church bells, the gathering to prayer; speaks his sympathy alike with the Scottish and the English service, and with solitary worship of the shepherd boy upon the hills; then paints the groups returning over the hills from church, and compares the scene of peace with the old days of persecution. Then his theme of religion widens; he sees worshippers in the hospital, in the prison; and condemns capital punishment of those who never have been taught their duty, condemns indiscriminate severity of criminal law. The teaching that should have averted crime suggests transition from the prison to the Sunday-school, and Grahame, dwelling on the comparative mildness of the Jewish law, sings next of the old Jewish year of Jubilee. Then he follows emigrants across the sea, and images the Scottish worship in the far wilds of America; the Sabbath of a man wrecked and alone upon a desert island, and his release by a missionary ship that approaches to the music of an old familiar hymn. Then follows praise of the self-denial of the missionary, and transition from this ship to the slave-ship, with an appeal to England against the encouragement of slavery. A strain of liberty follows, with a return to his much loved Scotland : : "O Scotland! much I love thy tranquil dales; But most on Sabbath eve, when low the sun Slants through the upland copse, 'tis my delight, Wandering, and stopping oft, to hear the song Of kindred praise arise from humble roofs; The poem closes with a blessing on the active life of Charity sustained by a true Sabbath spirit, and a comparison of the first joy of hope in the resurrection to the first hearing of the song of the lark by a man pent in cities: "How grateful 'tis to recollect the time When Hope arose to Faith! Faintly at first The first lark's note, faint yet, and short the song, As if it were a link 'tween earth and heaven." There is no gloom in Grahame's poetry. Blair's "Grave" has little else, the hope beyond the grave is at the close faintly suggested in comparison with all the unctuous dwelling on its actual corruption. Grahame sees only in death "the Sabbath of the tomb." His love for man and bird and beast is everywhere in his writing. In his "Birds of Scotland" he celebrates the linnet and the mavis and the merle and all, and has nothing but goodwill to the cuckoo, who has, on the whole, been ill-befriended by the poets. One passage from the "Birds of Scotland" we may take as characteristic of its author: "I love the neighbourhood of man and beasts: While raves the midnight storm, and hear the sound Though nothing can bring back the hour Which having been must ever be; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 180 190 200 So little was Wordsworth's "Excursion" understood in the days when it was written that a single edition of 500 copies lasted the English public for six years. The next edition of 500 it took seven years to sell. Robert Southey heard of a critic who boasted that he had crushed the "Excursion," and cried, "He crush the Excursion!' Tell him he might as well fancy he could crush Skiddaw." Wordsworth's friendship for Sir George Beaumont, which gave rise to the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," had its origin in 1803. Sir George was then staying with Coleridge, at Greta Hall, Keswick, and appreciated Coleridge's friend, Wordsworth, whom he had not seen. Knowing Coleridge's desire to have Wordsworth near him, Beaumont bought a piece of ground on a beautiful spot at Applethwaite, near Keswick, and gave it to Wordsworth as a site for a house that he might build there. Wordsworth wrote his thanks, and asked to be steward only of the land, and return it if he could not pitch his tent upon it. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Beaumont's death, in 1827. Sir George had afterwards a notion of building himself a house near Wordsworth, and bought Loughrigg Tarn. But this scheme also came to nothing, the tarn was re-sold, and the purchase-money placed at Wordsworth's disposal. He laid it out in the walling of Grasmere Churchyard and planting the yew-trees, in the shade of which his grave long afterwards was made. In 1821, when Wordsworth was staying with his friends, Sir George and Lady Beaumont, at Coleorton, Sir George was about to build a church on his estate. The church was the great daily topic of the house, and this led to conversations on church history. The impulse was thus given to the series of " Ecclesiastical Sonnets," in which Wordsworth traced the development of the English Church, axi dwelt on the religious life of England. Wordsworth felt strongly the power of a calm religious influene in aid of that true individual development which was to him the chief hope of the future. His experience of the French Revolution led him to doubt the restless spirit of outward change, and he felt truly the the gains of civil liberty in England were due in large measure to the religious spirit that inspired the battle. OBLIGATIONS OF CIVIL TO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. Ungrateful Country, if thou e'er forget And Russell's milder blood the scaffold wet: Had not thy holy Church her champions bred. The star of Liberty to rise. Nor yet (Grave this within thy heart!) if spiritual things Be lost, through apathy, or scorn, or fear, Shalt thou thy humbler franchises support, However hardly won or justly dear: What came from heaven to heaven by nature ciars And, if dissevered thence, its course is short. The series of these "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" closed with a bold glance forward, preluded! Sonnets on Church-building. These are upon George Beaumont's new church, built amidst the grass and trees of his grounds. This, for exaIL! is the Sonnet on the Consecration and Encios of its Churchyard: THE NEW CHURCHYARD. The encircling ground, in native turf arrayed, To social interests, and to favouring Heaven, That is followed by Sonnets on English Cathed and such piles as the Chapel of King's Coling Cambridge. CATHEDRALS, ETC. Open your gates, ye everlasting Piles! Instinct to rouse the heart and lead the will mation. His strength sank. On the 7th of April he was eighty years old, and was prayed for in Rydal Chapel. When his daughter Dora died in 1847 he wrote, "Our sorrow, I feel, is for life; but God's will be done." When he had now to be told that his own course was closing, his wife gave him the desired warning by whispering, "William, you are going to Dora." He died on the afternoon of the 23rd, and was buried in Grasmere Churchyard. A tablet to his memory with a medallion of his head in bas-relief was afterwards placed in Grasmere Church, over the pew he had once occupied there. THE NAVE AND WEST TRANSEPT, LINCOLN. And this is Wordsworth's closing glance into the future: CONCLUSION. Why sleeps the future, as a snake enrolled, The living Waters, less and less by guilt Two years later, in 1823, Wordsworth addressed to Lady Le Fleming a poem on the chapel or church she was then building at Rydal, which was to be Wordsworth's place of public worship during the rest of his life, until his death in 1850. In that year, on Sunday, the 10th of March, he attended service at Rydal Chapel for the last time. Between four and five in the evening he set out to walk to Grasmere in a keen north-east wind, lightly clad and looking feeble. He was about on the two next days in cold bright weather, called at a cottage, and sat down on the stone seat of the porch to watch the setting sun. On the 14th came pain in the side; on the 20th his throat and chest were affected with severe inflam John Keble was born in 1792 at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, the second child and eldest son of the Rev. John Keble, who was vicar of Coln St. Aldwin's, about three miles from Fairford, where he lived in a house of his own. Keble's mother had been Sarah Maule, daughter of the incumbent of Ringwood, in Hampshire. The father educated the son for college, and took him in 1806 to his own college in Oxford, Corpus Christi, where he obtained a scholarship when not quite fifteen. He obtained a Fellowship of Oriel, and took private pupils before he was ordained. Then he assisted his father as curate in charge of two small parishes, but was recalled to take a Tutorship at Oriel. In May, 1823, his mother died, and in that year John Keble left Oxford and joined his father at Fairford. Having been a Tutor at Oriel for five years, during which time he had twice served as Public Examiner, and once as Master of the Schools, he returned to the two little curacies, and to the aid and companionship of his father and his two sisters, whom he called playfully his wife and his sweetheart, Elizabeth and Mary Anne. Keble's father lived to the age of ninety, venerated by his son. The elder sister, Elizabeth, was delicate in health, gravely gentle and affectionate-her, Keble called his wife. The other sister, Mary Anne, with her own depths of earnestness, was cheerful and playful as John Keble himself could be; they lived in a half sportive companionship of love. In 1825 Keble became curate of Hursley, where the incumbent was Archdeacon Heathcote, who lived at Winchester. Sir William Heathcote, who had just succeeded to the property at Hursley, and recommended Keble to the curacy, found him a house between his own park gates and the church, which he set in order for him. His brother Thomas, who had lately married, took his place in the curacies at home. His sister Mary Anne was one of his first visitors in his new home, and also an old college friend, who afterwards brought the purest spirit of religion into the teacher's work at Rugby, Thomas Arnold, then living with pupils at Nuneham. "I have tried," wrote Keble, "the cozie powers of the Hursley air, not only with Mary Anne, who has paid me a visit of five weeks ending the 9th January, but also with Tom Arnold, who ran down here like a good neighbour, and surveyed the premises and the neighbourhood presently after Christmas. How very unaltered he is, and how very comfortable and contented! he is one of the persons whom it does one good to think of when I am in a grumbling vein." In September, 1826, John Keble's beloved playfellow sister, his "sweetheart" Mary Anne, died. He had been writing for some years the poems which he was about to publish as "The Christian Year." Upon his sister's death he expressed his feeling in tender verses, which were printed in the British Magazine among those sacred poems by himself and others that were collected in 1836 into a volume published at Derby as the "Lyra Apostolica." To generalise the poem, he printed "brother" for "sister" in one of the closing stanzas, but the "happy soul" passed into the spirit world is that of the sister upon whose funeral Keble wrote, with a full heart, of In June, 1827, was published the first edition of "The Christian Year," a series of meditative pos in which Keble dwelt on some incident or passage I the lessons for the day on each Sunday and Holyday the year's service in the Church of England. The was no author's name upon the title-page, no prete sion in the manner of the publication, and Keble wa not a poet of the highest rank. But the religios music of the book is true. John Keble's devoti was deep and unaffected; his love of God and ma his pure domestic feeling that set his unambities life in the midst of home associations of his chia hood, his simple and pure sense of nature that bal caused him to delight in Wordsworth's poetry eva in his undergraduate days when it had few fres all make themselves felt. He had a cultivated mu poetic sensibilities, a natural grace in his wh nature, and the charm of his religious purity. H was really the first moving cause of a reaction at Oxford that carried some over to Rome; but his devotion to the Church in all her ordinances was so inseparable from a life that in all its acts and utterances looked to heaven, that in the hottest strife of parties no man has supposed Keble to be an enemy. Within twenty-six years after the publication of the "Christian Year" 108,000 copies had been sold in forty-three editions. After Keble's death there were in nine months seven editions or 11,000 copies sold. The spirit in which Keble used his gift of song, and which is at the soul of the best poetry of England-Chaucer's, Shakespeare's, Spenser's, Milton's, Wordsworth's-whether or not its themes be formally religious, is expressed in this piece written for PALM SUNDAY. Ye whose hearts are beating high (If the word be not too bold,) Giving virtue a new birth, And a life that ne'er grows old Sovereign masters of all hearts! By whose strength ye sweep the string, His Hosannas here below; Mount, and claim your glorious meed; Linger not with sin and woe. But if ye should hold your peace, Stones in earth's dark womb that rest, High and low in choir shall meet, Ere His Name shall be unblest. Lord, by every minstrel tongue That thine angels' harps may ne'er Be thy praise so duly sung, Or, if before thee in the race, Urge him with thine advancing tread, Till, like twin stars, with even pace, Each lucid course be duly sped. No fading frail memorial give 30 At the end of 1831, John Keble was nominated to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, and gave his first lecture in February, 1832. In 1833, he was appointed by the Vice-Chancellor to preach the |