Clings the Eternal Child;
Favor'd beyond Archangel's dream,
When first on thee with tenderest gleam
Thy new-born Saviour smil'd.”[172]
But Keble caught from an excursion to Ben Nevis, as his biographer conjectures, the hints of that beautiful poem, “Mother out of Sight,” which was intended for the Lyra Innocentium, but through the influence of two friends, Dyson and Sir John Coleridge, was withheld by the author, and only saw the light as one of his posthumous pieces. It has a clearer doctrinal ring than the stanzas for the Feast of the Annunciation, which foreshadow something of the intercessory power of the Mother of God. It merits the high praise which Keble's ever-faithful friend and, for years, his gifted ally bestows upon him. We more than regret that space forbids us giving the entire poem. It loses much of its beauty and continuity by fragmentary quotation, yet, from the fourteen stanzas, we are only able to reproduce four:
“Yearly since then with bitterer cry
Man hath assailed the throne on high,
And sin and hate more fiercely striven
To mar the league 'twixt earth and heaven.
But the dread tie that pardoning hour,