The great mass of Keble’s letters to his pupil and friend have disappeared: but we have the answer promptly sent to this, and written with his own winning humility. ‘For your telling me exactly what you think about [the verses] I shall hold you in greater honour as long as I live.’ He goes on, sweetly and sagaciously, to explain that The Christian Year but aimed at helping ‘the plain and good.’[32] It will be remembered that the archpriest of letters, Mr. William Wordsworth, once offered to go over The Christian Year, with a view to correcting the English. To that height Hurrell could not rise.
To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 6, 1825.
‘“Sir, my dear friend,” you cannot tell how much I am obliged to you for your benevolence to my last letter, but that does not make me the less a fool for having expressed myself so; and what provokes me most of all is that I did not give myself fair play by not writing till my opinions had settled;
for as far as my memory goes, I think they are now undergoing a revolution, and that if I were to see the pottery[33] in question again, I should think quite differently of it. There is something about them which leaves (to use the words of our friend Tom Moore)
‘“A sad remembrance fondly kept
When all lighter thoughts are faded.”
And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.—I wrote the foregoing not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one, no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34] who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic (which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:—were incidents not calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by, which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the
same, and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard, and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]
‘… My father has found the Εἰκὼν [βασιλική] among some old books, and I have been reading it. It puts me in mind of a verse in this morning’s Psalms: “Thou shalt hide me privily by Thine own presence from the provoking of all men, Thou shalt keep me secretly in Thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues”; which seems to point out the clearest and most beautiful instance of the moral government of God being begun on earth. I should like to know the Hebrew of the verse before: “O how plentiful is Thy goodness, which Thou hast prepared for them that trust in Thee even before the sons of men.” For if “before” means “in the presence of,” then David is drawing the conclusion I want; but I am afraid it must mean “greater than falls to the lot of the rest of mankind.” … Please to look, when you are in a humour for it, in Medea, 705, where Ægeus says, εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ δὴ φροῦδος εἰμὶ πᾶς ἐγώ. The commentators cited by Elmsley have fumbled much about it, and some of them I do not understand; but may it not mean: “For as to my name continuing in my posterity, in that respect I am clean gone.” If εἰς τοῦτο will bear this signification, it is certainly prettier than as it is commonly explained. I like Hecuba far better than Medea…. Another interval has elapsed, and the leaves, which had held out surprisingly hitherto, have almost totally disappeared, and now we may reckon winter to be fairly set in. I wish I could write verses to perform the obsequies of this delicious summer, the like of which will probably never visit the abodes of mortals again….’
The little implied joke, celibate and Greek, on his own name, is not the least adornment of this charming letter.