rst
importance merely as literature. The reaction from an enormous
popularity of nearly seventy years' date, and the growth of
anti-dogmatic opinions, have brought about a sort of tendency in some
quarters to belittle, if not positively to sneer at, _The Christian
Year_, which, with the _Lyra Innocentium_ and a collection of
_Miscellaneous Poems_, contains Keble's poetical work. There never was
anything more uncritical. The famous reference which Thackeray--the
least ecclesiastically inclined, if by no means the least religious, of
English men of letters of genius in this century--makes to its
appearance in _Pendennis_, shows what the thoughts of unbiassed
contemporaries were. And no very different judgment can be formed by
unbiassed posterity. With Herbert and Miss Rossetti, Keble ranks as the
greatest of English writers in sacred verse, the irregular and unequal
efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw sometimes transcending, oftener sinking
below the three. If Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of
Christina Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while
he escapes the quaint triviality, or the triviality sometimes not even
quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth is strongly
shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely original manner.
The lack of taste which mars so much religious poetry never shows
itself even for a moment in Keble; yet the correctness of his diction,
like the orthodoxy of his thought, is never frigid or tame. There are
few poets who so well deserve the nickname of a Christian Horace, though
the phrase may seem to have something of the paradox of "prose
Shakespeare." The careful melody of the versification and the exact
felicity of the diction exclude, it may be, those highest flights which
create most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure,
proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has few
superiors.

It would indeed be surprising if he had many, for, with his gift of
verse, he was also one of the most accomplished of critics. His
_Praelectiones Academicae_, written, as the rule then was, in Latin, is
unfortunately a sealed book to too many persons whom modern practice
calls and strives to consider "educated"; but he did not confine himself
even in these to classical subjects, and he wrote not a few reviews in
English dealing with modern poetry. His aesthetics are of course deeply
tinged with ethic; but he does not i