Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/30

 Christian Year. In this book Keble created a new method and a new aim in religious poetry. The religious poets of the Eighteenth Century were more hymn-writers than poets, but the greater part of Keble's work was quite apart from the inevitable conventionality of the hymn, even when it was written by Cowper. Nor was it fantastic, like that of Herbert, or philosophical like that of Vaughan or More. It was simple, moving on the common meadow-paths of gentle devotion; and its only philosophy was that of the heart of humble men seeking communion with God. At the same time, it bound up with itself a set of large religious ideas. It seized on, and brought into poetry the mighty, emotionalising traditions of the Church from the earliest times; the weight and passion of two thousand years of thought and associated action. It had not force enough to represent the thousandth part of this, but what it did grasp redeemed religious poetry from the narrow limits which confined it to prayer and praise alone. Moreover, it brought religious poetry out of the closed sphere of the inner life into the home, into the trials and temptations of the social life of men and women. The whole range of devotional poetry was expanded. Again, he brought religious feeling into union with the new love of nature for her own sake. The mountains, rivers, woods, and plains, the glories of the morning, evening, and nightly sky, are in his pages, gently, serenely felt. And he used the tender grace, the beauty of the scenery of