an of
the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the
studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson.

Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from
the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr.
Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in
which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly
acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and
affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do
not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his
theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the
truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have
made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious
feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs,
they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and
antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion
are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his
simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity,
combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure
and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them
full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling
with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the
very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all
hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular
doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange
contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and
disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,
less so even than others whose names are associated with his; and it is
evident that to the public in general he presented a strange assemblage
of incoherent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities. His mind seemed
to work and act in different directions; and the results at the end
seemed to be with wide breaks and interruptions between them. But a
book like this enables us to trace back these diverging lines to the
centre from which they spring. What seemed to be in such sharp
contradiction at the outside is seen to flow naturally from the
perfectly homogeneous and consistent character within. Many people will
of course except to the character. It is not the type likely to