The step that had first been taken was one for which many generations far and wide have reason to be grateful, the arrangement and publication of the Lyra Innocentium, to a certain degree on the lines of the Christian Year, so as to have one poem appropriated to each Sunday and holy day (though these were only fully marked off in a later edition).
The book is perhaps less universally read than the Christian Year, and is more unequal, some poems rising higher and into greater beauty, some deeper and showing that the soul had made further progress in these twenty years, some very simple in structure, fit for little children, yet with a grave and solemn thought in the last verse.
Those that are specially full of Hursley atmosphere, on events connected with the author, may be touched on here.
“Christmas Eve Vespers” was suggested by the schoolmaster’s little daughter going into church before the decoration had been put up, and exclaiming, disappointed, “No Christmas!” “The Second Sunday in Lent” recalls, in the line on “the mimic rain on poplar leaves,” the sounds made by a trembling aspen, whose leaves quivered all through the summer evenings, growing close to the house of Mr. Keble’s life-long friend and biographer, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, at Ottery St. Mary. An engraving of Raffaelle’s last picture “The Transfiguration” hung in the Vicarage drawing-room.
“The Fourth Sunday in Lent,” on the offering of the lad with the five loaves, was suggested by the stained window on that subject given by the young Marquess of Lothian—a pupil for some years of Mr. Wilson at Ampfield—to the church at Jedburgh, built by his mother. Now that he has passed away, it may be remarked that he, as well as all the children commemorated in these poems, grew up so as to leave no painful impression connected with them. “Keep thou, dear boy, thine early vow,” was fulfilled in him, as it was with George Herbert Moberly, the eldest son of Dr. Moberly, who, when a young child staying at the vicarage, was unconsciously the cause of the poems “Loneliness” and “Repeating the Creed,” for Easter Sunday and Low Sunday. Frightened by unwonted solitude at bedtime, he asked to hear “something true,” and was happy when Mrs. Keble produced the Bible. He was a boy of beautiful countenance, and his reverent, thoughtful look, as he repeated the Creed, delighted Mr. Keble. It was little expected then that he was doomed to a life-long struggle with invalidism, though he was able to effect much as a thinker and a priest before he, too, was taken to see in Paradise “the glorious dream around him burst.”
It was a baby sister of his who drew herself up in her nurse’s arms with a pretty gesture, like a pheasant’s neck in a sort of reproof, as she said “Thank you” to her little self, when she had held out a flower to Mr. Keble, which, for once in his life, he did not notice; and his self-reproach produced the thoughts of thankfulness. One of the gems of the Lyra, “Bereavement,” was the thought that came to the mind of the Pastor as he buried the little sister, the only child except the elder girl, of the bailiff at Dr. Moberly’s farm. “Fire” embodied his feeling about a burnt child at Ampfield—
We miss thee from thy place at school
And on thy homeward way,
Where violets, by the shady pool,
Peep out so shyly gay
The Lullaby, with the view of the burnished cross upon the spire, and the girl singing the baby to sleep with the old Psalm—
In Thee I put my stedfast trust,
Defend me, Lord, for Thou art just,
is another Ampfield scene, inspiring noble and gentle thoughts for Innocents’ Day.