rn of his colleagues and a considerable
lightening both of his professional and of his manifold civic duties. He
was, moreover, much encouraged--as a man of his modest, almost
diffident, nature was bound to be--by the recognition which _Songs of
the Ridings_ had brought from every side: not least from the dalesmen,
for whom and under whose inspiration they were written. And all his
friends rejoiced to think that a new and brighter horizon seemed opening
before him. Those who saw him during these last months thought that he
had never been so buoyant. They felt that a new hope and a new
confidence had entered into his life.

These hopes were suddenly cut off. He had passed most of August and the
first week of September (1919) at his cottage in Lytton Dale, keeping
the morning of his birthday (8th September), as he always delighted to
do, with his wife and children. In the afternoon he went down to bathe
in the river, being himself an excellent swimmer, and wishing to teach
his two younger children an art in which he had always found health and
keen enjoyment. He swam across the pool and called on his daughter to
follow him. Noticing that she was in some difficulty, he jumped in again
to help her, but suddenly sank to the bottom, and was never seen alive
again. An angler ran up to help from a lower reach of the stream, and
brought the girl safely to land. Then, for the first time learning that
her father had sunk, he dived and dived again in the hope of finding him
before it was too late. But the intense cold of the water baffled all
his efforts, and the body was not recovered until some hours later. It
is probable that the chill of the pool had caused a sudden failure of
Moorman's heart--a heart already weakened by the excessive strain of the
last few years--and it is little likely that, after he had once sunk, he
could ever have been saved.

The death of Moorman called forth expressions of grief and of grateful
affection, so strong and so manifestly sincere as to bring something of
surprise even to his closest friends. Much more surprising would they
have been to himself. They came from every side, from lettered and
unlettered, from loom and dale, from school and university. Nothing
could prove more clearly how strong was the hold he had won upon all who
knew him, how large the place he filled in the heart of his colleagues
and the county of his adoption. It was a fitting tribute to a literary
achievement of very distin