Of busy grinders at the well-filled rack;

Or flapping wing, and crow of chanticleer,
Long ere the lingering morn; or bouncing flails,
That tell the dawn is near! Pleasant the path
By sunny garden-wall, when all the fields
Are chill and comfortless; or barn-yard snug,
Where flocking birds, of various plume, and chirp
Discordant, cluster on the leaning stack,

From whence the thresher draws the rustling sheaves.

O Nature! all thy seasons please the eye
Of him who sees a Deity in all.

It is His presence that diffuses charms
Unspeakable, o'er mountain, wood, and stream.
To think that He, who hears the heavenly choirs,
Hearkens complacent to the woodland song;-
To think that He, who rolls yon solar sphere,
Uplifts the warbling songster to the sky;
To mark His presence in the mighty bow
That spans the clouds, as in the tints minute
Of tiniest flower, to hear His awful voice
In thunder speak, and whisper in the gale;
To know, and feel His care for all that lives;-
"Tis this that makes the barren waste appear
A fruitful field, each grove a paradise.
Yes! place me 'mid far stretching woodless wilds,
Where no sweet song is heard; the heath-bell there
Would soothe my weary sight, and tell of Thee!
There would my gratefully uplifted eye
Survey the heavenly vault, by day,—by night,
When glows the firmament from pole to pole;
There would my overflowing heart exclaim,
"The heavens declare the glory of the Lord,
The firmament shews forth His handy work!'"

But of all poets of this time it was Wordsworth who felt most deeply the relation of a love of outside nature to a love of man, and the place of man in the great harmony of creation. His work it was to show, as prophet of Nature

"How the mind of man becomes

A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself

Of quality and fabric more divine."

We have seen in another volume1 how Wordsworth's active sympathy with the first hopes and efforts of the French Revolution developed into strong and quiet sense of the one path to the fulfilment of their aim. "Having gained," he said,

"A more judicious knowledge of the worth And dignity of individual man,

No composition of the brain, but man

Of whom we read, the man whom we behold With our own eyes,-I could not but inquireNot with less interest than heretofore,

1 "Shorter English Poems," pages 417, 418; 434.

* See Vaughan's "Retreat," pages 288, 289, of the present volume.

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A presence which is not to be put by; Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realised,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

120

130

140

150

160

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 Ecclesiastical Sonnets," in which Wordsworth

of

traced the development of the English Church, and dwelt on the religious life of England. Wordsworth felt strongly the power of a calm religious influence 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 that 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
The sons who for thy civil rights have bled!
How, like a Roman, Sidney bowed his head,

And Russell's milder blood the scaffold wet;

But these had fallen for profitless regret

Had not thy holy Church her champions bred,
And claims from other worlds inspirited

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 clings, And, if dissevered thence, its course is short.

The series of these "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" is closed with a bold glance forward, preluded by Sonnets on Church-building. These are upon Sir George Beaumont's new church, built amidst the grass and trees of his grounds. This, for example, is the Sonnet on the Consecration and Enclosure of its Churchyard:

THE NEW CHURCHYARD.

The encircling ground, in native turf arrayed,
Is now by solemn consecration given
To social interests, and to favouring Heaven,
And where the rugged colts their gambols played,
And wild deer bounded through the forest glade,
Unchecked, as when by merry Outlaw driven,
Shall hymns of praise resound at morn and even;
And soon, full soon, the lonely Sexton's spade
Shall wound the tender sod. Encincture small,
But infinite its grasp of weal and woe!
Hopes, fears, in never-ending ebb and flow:-
The spousal trembling, and the " dust to dust,"
The prayers, the contrite struggle, and the trust
That to the Almighty Father looks through all.

That is followed by Sonnets on English Cathedrals and such piles as the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge.

CATHEDRALS, ETC.

Open your gates, ye everlasting Piles!

Types of the spiritual Church which God hath reared;
Not loth we quit the newly-hallowed sward
And humble altar, 'mid your sumptuous aisles
To kneel, or thrid your intricate defiles,
Or down the nave to pace in motion slow
Watching, with upward eye, the tall tower grow
And mount, at every step, with living wiles

Instinct-to rouse the heart and lead the will
By a bright ladder to the world above.
Open your gates, ye Monuments of love
Divine! thou Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill!
Thou, stately York! and Ye, whose splendours cheer
Isis and Cam, to patient Science dear!

On the 7th of April

mation. His strength sank. 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,
Coil within coil, at noon-tide? For the WORD
Yields, if with unpresumptuous faith explored,
Power at whose touch the sluggard shall unfold
His drowsy rings. Look forth!-that stream behold,
THAT STREAM upon whose bosom we have passed
Floating at ease while nations have effaced
Nations, and Death has gathered to his fold
Long lines of mighty kings-look forth my Soul!
Nor in this vision be thou slow to trust.

The living Waters, less and less by guilt
Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll,
Till they have reached the eternal City-built
For the perfected Spirits of the just!

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 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

BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

I thought to meet no more, so dreary seemed Death's interposing veil, and thou so pure, Thy place in Paradise

Beyond where I could soar,

in one

Religious poems written at different times by John Keble had multiplied, and for some time past he had been writing others with the purpose of arranging them into a harmonious volume, designed to aid in the maintenance of a religious spirit in the English Church.

In June, 1827, was published the first edition of "The Christian Year," a series of meditative poems in which Keble dwelt on some incident or passage in the lessons for the day on each Sunday and Holyday of the year's service in the Church of England. There was no author's name upon the title-page, no pretension in the manner of the publication, and Keble was not a poet of the highest rank. But the religious music of the book is true. John Keble's devotion was deep and unaffected; his love of God and man, his pure domestic feeling that set his unambitious life in the midst of home associations of his childhood, his simple and pure sense of nature that had caused him to delight in Wordsworth's poetry even in his undergraduate days when it had few friends, all make themselves felt. He had a cultivated mind, poetic sensibilities, a natural grace in his whole nature, and the charm of his religious purity. He