ment, because it illustrates so well Keble's intense dislike to the personal, the autobiographical element in poetry, that "self-revelation" which is so much in demand at present. Secondly, it shows that he laboured under a deep-seated error as to what was and what was not suitable material for poetical treatment. The second principle would be bad enough if it referred to composition, but when it deals with the correction of the hymns of other authors it is unpardonable. The third principle illustrates his reverence for antiquity and tradition.

We will now take the Christian Year and we will say at the outset that we do not propose to consider it, except incidentally, from the doctrinal and hortatory point of view. We must first remember that whatever be its merits and demerits, it is a book that has achieved a popularity of an absolutely phenomenal kind. It is a book that has been bought and read in England as Shakespeare, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe, and in

America as the works of E. P. Roe.

In 1853 it was in its forty-second edition, twenty-five

years after its publication.

In 1873, when the

copyright expired, it had reached the 158th edition, and it is still in demand.

For many

It

years it took its place, with High Church people, by the side of the Bible and Prayer Book. would be incredible, were it not true, that a book

of religious poetry, not suitable for public worship, the outcome of a very definite school of thought, should have achieved such a success. It was undoubtedly what the world wanted.

Now, let us first take some of its obvious demerits before we proceed to discuss its merits. In the first place, it is often careless in form and obscure in expression. It was consciously so, and Keble, probably wisely, refused to alter and amend it, imagining that such afterwork often sacrificed some of the freshness of inspiration. It was this carelessness that made Wordsworth, who read it with great admiration, say of it, "It is very good-so good that, if it were mine, I should write it all over again."

The metrical schemes are often complicated and unsatisfactory. Many of the poems are far too long, so as to be hardly lyrical. Such poems as that for Advent Sunday, or the Second Sunday after Trinity, contain between seventy and eighty heroic lines. Then, again, the cyclical instinct which beset Keble, made him provide poems for every event, every service of the Christian year. Thus we have Gunpowder Treason and the Churching of Women celebrated, though it must be owned that, in these cases, the poem has but the slightest connection with the subject.

Next-and this is a more serious point-the poems have been praised for their frequent references to nature and the fidelity of their

imagery; after careful study of the Christian
Year one is compelled to say that this praise is
not deserved: the imagery is of a purely conven-
tional character, and the observation employed
of the most general kind. Dean Stanley said, in
praise of Keble's descriptive passages, that his
local and topographical details, whenever he
spoke of the Holy Land, were marvellously clear
and accurate. But this is not really a compli-
ment. It shows that Keble was content to
describe without his eye on the object, and rely-
ing on the observation of others; and if the
pictures of landscapes that he had not seen are
among his most felicitous passages, we may well
be excused for mistrusting his powers of observa-
tion when dealing with the features of his own
native country.
The fact is that he did not
seize upon salient features; Matthew Arnold, in
such a poem as the "Scholar Gypsy," brings the
Oxford atmosphere, the high gravelly hills, the
deep water-meadows, before the eye; but Keble's
landscape is the conventional English landscape,
and has no precise definition, no native air. For
instance, in the poem for "Trinity Sunday" he
says:

As travellers on some woodland height,
When wintry suns are gleaming bright,
Lose in arch'd glades their tangled sight;
By glimpses such as dreamers love,
Through her grey veil the leafless grove
Shows where the distant shadows rove.

Will any one say that there is the least precision
about this picture? What kind of a place is he
describing? How different it is from such verses
as are found on every page of Tennyson, as
A full-fed river winding slow

By herds upon an endless plain,

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,

With shadow-streaks of rain.

Again, when Keble is describing the source of the moorland spring, some of which is beautifully delineated, he says (" Monday in Easter Week ") :

Perchance that little brook shall flow

The bulwark of some mighty realm,

Bear navies to and fro

With monarchs at their helm.

Or canst thou guess how far away

Some sister nymph, beside her urn
Reclining night and day,

'Mid reeds and mountain fern,

Nurses her store, with thine to blend?

This is pure conventionalism: the mixture of the reclining nymph and the mountain fern is not felicitous. Constitutional monarchs do not steer their own ironclads, and it is not picturesque even to pretend that they do.

The following may stand as instances of his failure in precise delineation. In the very first

stanza of the book we have:

Hues of the rich unfolding morn,
That ere the glorious sun be born,

Around his path are taught to swell.

"Swell" is a property of bulk. or sound, surely not of light? Again, addressing the breeze, he says:

Wakenest each little leaf to sing.

This is purely conventional; how different from the "laurel's pattering talk" of Tennyson. Again:

The torrent rill

That winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell,
Touched by the blue mist well.

How weak a word to end a stanza!

The birds of heaven before us fleet,

They cannot brook our shame to meet.

Again:

How falsetto, how prejudiced a tone! And these are not isolated instances: similar infelicities occur on every page.

Keble's whole view of Nature, it must be said, was onesided and wanting in insight. Nature was to him nothing but a type of mild fervour and uncomplaining patience. "All true, all faultless, all in tune," he says. To the cruelty, the waste, the ugliness, that seem so inextricably intertwined with natural processes, he diligently closed his eyes. Thus, in No. 9 of the Lyra Innocentium he propagates a host of innocent superstitions as to the power of childhood over wild beasts. It surely is not poetical to say of a baby:

The tiger's whelp encaged with thee

Would sheathe his claws to sport and play;
Bees have for thee no sting.

because it is not true.