Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/108

 96 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

Hymn 85. There is a book who runs may read.

JOHN KEBLE, M.A.

The Christian Year ; part of the twelve-verse poem for Septuagesima Sunday, with the text, Rom. i. 20. It was written in 1819, and was sung over Keble s grave.

Keble was born in 1792 at Fairford, Gloucestershire, where his father educated him and his brother till they went to Oxford. In 1806 he won a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, and in 1810 a double First, which up to that time had been gained by no one except Sir Robert Peel. He was elected Fellow of Oriel next year at the age of nineteen, and remained at Oxford till 1823, when his mother died, and he returned to Fairford. He published The Christian Year m 1827, became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1831, and in 1833 preached his famous Assize Sermon at Oxford, of which Newman said, I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious move ment of 1833. Two years later he became vicar of Hursley. He died at Bournemouth, on March 29, 1866. His wife survived him only six weeks, and was buried at his side in Hursley Churchyard.

Newman says that in The Christian Year ( Keble struck an original note, and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school long unknown in England. Dr. Arnold, who saw some of the poems in manuscript, wrote to Sir John T. Coleridge, I live in hopes that he will be induced to publish them, and it is my firm opinion that nothing equal to them exists in our language. The wonderful knowledge of Scripture, the purity of heart, and the richness of poetry which they exhibit, I never saw paralleled. Bishop Barry describes it as a book which leads the soul up to God, not through one, but through all of the various faculties which He has implanted in it. It had an extraordinary reception. Ten years before Keble s death a hundred thousand copies had been sold. Its popularity is illustrated by a story told of Wilberforce and his four sons, who planned a holiday together. Each was to bring some new book which might be read aloud. When the time arrived, it was found that each had brought The Christian Year. It made Keble the poet of the Oxford Movement. Hursley still seems to be full of his memory. The spot where his coffin rested in the church is marked by a brass cross let into a stone, round

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