his own ritual he borrowed from both; yet he could
fulminate hotly enough at times against the excesses of either. He
loved deeply and hated strongly; but the love was permanent and real,
the hatred transient and superficial.

He had a lifelong bitterness against Dissenters, and lived on the
tenderest terms with many. His bark was very much worse than his bite.
"I understand, Mr. Hawker," once said a Nonconformist lady to him,
"that you have an objection to burying Dissenters?" "Madam," he
replied, "I should be only too delighted to bury you all." But there
was no real sting behind the words, and some of his dearest and
kindest parishioners were not Churchmen. He spent his days in doing
good deeds to man and beast, saving strangers from the devouring sea,
or giving their bodies Christian burial; tutoring the rugged hearts of
his people; and living himself, in spite of much sorrow,
disappointment, loss, in a world of holy dream and vision, conversing
in spirit with saints and angels. Hawker believed that his dear
country was given over to doubt and laxity; and every affliction of
war, misfortune, bad weather, he interpreted as the chastening hand of
God. He would have had his world coloured entirely by faith and
religious observance; stained as it were, like the glass of church
windows, by sacred image and story. But practicalities pressed heavily
upon him and almost broke his heart; his poetic impulse failed under
sore discouragement; he did not proceed with his finest poem; those of
his poems that became popular did so without the attachment of his
name. Very much of this was due to his own procedure; yet the man had
much hardship, neglect, and suffering, for which he could in no sense
be held responsible. He was a true descendant of the early Cornish
saints, born perhaps several centuries too late, and thrust upon a
world where he had to turn to sea and wind and woodland for the mystic
symbolism which was his life-breath, finding too little of it in the
ways and words of Victorian England.

The present vicarage at Morwenstow was built by Hawker himself, there
having been no vicar in residence for long years before his coming. It
was here, in 1848, that Tennyson visited him, coming over from Bude,
where he was staying at the Falcon Hotel. In stepping hastily from the
garden to reach the sea, when he first arrived, the poet had fallen;
there was no protecting rail there at that time. The injury proved so
serious that