trace is to be seen in the mournful
and heavily lined faces of the faithful. Autres temps, autres moeurs!
Perhaps the simple, coarse mental palates of the village folk were none
the worse for this realistic treatment of sin. One wonders what the
saintly and refined Keble, who spent many years of his life as his
father's curate here, thought of it all. Probably his submissive and
deferential mind accepted it as in some ecclesiastical sense symbolical
of the merciless hatred of God for the desperate corruption of humanity.
It gave me little pleasure to connect the personality of Keble with the
place, patient, sweet-natured, mystical, serviceable as he was. It seems
hard to breathe in the austere air of a mind like Keble's, where the
wind of the spirit blows chill down the narrow path, fenced in by the
high, uncompromising walls of ecclesiastical tradition on the one hand,
and stern Puritanism on the other. An artificial type, one is tempted to
say!--and yet one ought never, I suppose, so to describe any flower that
has blossomed fragrantly upon the human stock; any system that seems to
extend a natural and instinctive appeal to certain definite classes of
human temperament.

I sped pleasantly enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with
hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite variety
of habitations. Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire,
"a pretty pyramis of stone," as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a
charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone
balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running
below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the
river water spouted clear and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the
flat meadows, bright with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over
the clustered house-roofs to the west.

Then further still by a lonely ill-laid road. And thus, with a mind
pleasantly attuned to beauty and a quickening pulse, I drew near to
Kelmscott. The great alluvial flat, broadening on either hand, with low
wooded heights, "not ill-designed," as Morris said, to the south. Then
came a winding cross-track, and presently I drew near to a straggling
village, every house of which had some charm and quality of style, with
here and there a high gabled dovecot, and its wooden cupola, standing up
among solid barns and stacks. Here was a tiny and inconspicuous church,
with a small stone belfry; and the