John Keble

John Keble ca.1860

John Keble (25 April 1792 – 29 March 1866) was an English churchman, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, and gave his name to Keble College, Oxford.

Quotes

• As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.
  • Lectures on Poetry 1832–1841 (1844), translated from the Latin by Edward Kershaw Francis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), Vol. I, Lecture XVI, p. 317.

• The deeds we do, the words we say,—
  Into still air they seem to fleet,
  We count them ever past;
  But they shall last,
  In the dread judgment they
  And we shall meet!
  • "IV. Early Warnings, § 1: Effect of Example", in Lyra Innocentium (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1846), p. 103.

• The voice that breathed o'er Eden,
  That earliest wedding day,
  The primal marriage blessing,
  It hath not passed away.
  • "Holy Matrimony", in The Salisbury Hymn-Book, ed. Horatio Bolton, Earl Nelson (Salisbury: Brown and Co., 1857), p. 174; reprinted in Miscellaneous Poems, ed. George Moberly (Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1870), p. 119.

• When you find yourself, as I daresay you sometimes do, overpowered as it were by melancholy, the best way is to go out, and do something kind to somebody or other.
  • Letters of Spiritual Counsel and Guidance, ed. R. F. Wilson (Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1870), Letter III, p. 6.

The Christian Year (1827)

The Christian Year (London: Humphrey Milford, 1827)

• The trivial round, the common task,
  Would furnish all we ought to ask.
  • "Morning", p. 3.

• And help us, this and every day,
  To live more nearly as we pray.
  • "Morning", p. 3.

• Sun of my soul! thou Saviour dear,
  It is not night if Thou be near:
  Oh, may no earth-born cloud arise
  To hide Thee from Thy servant's eyes!
  • "Evening", p. 4.

• Abide with me from morn till eve,
  For without Thee I cannot live:
  Abide with me when night is nigh,
  For without Thee I dare not die.
  • "Evening", p. 4.

• Sprinkled along the waste of years
  Full many a soft green isle appears:
  Pause where we may along the desert road,
  Some shelter is in sight, some sacred safe abode.
  • "The First Sunday in Advent", p. 7.

• When the shore is won at last,
  Who will count the billows past?
  • "S. John the Evangelist's Day", p. 21.

• Time's waters will not ebb, nor stay.
  • "The First Sunday after Christmas Day", p. 25.

• Soft as Memnon's harp at morning,
  To the inward ear devout,
  Touched by light, with heavenly warning
  Your transporting chords ring out.
  Every leaf in every nook,
  Every wave in every brook,
  Chanting with a solemn voice,
  Minds us of our better choice.
  • "The First Sunday after the Epiphany", p. 34.

• Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look
  When hearts are of each other sure;
  Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
  The haunt of all affections pure.
  • "The First Sunday in Lent", p. 60.

• Give us grace to listen well.
  • "The Sunday Next before Easter, or Palm Sunday", p. 72.

• Love masters agony; the soul that seemed
  Forsaken, feels her present God again,
  And in her Father's arms
  Contented dies away.
  • "Tuesday before Easter", p. 77.

• The watchful mother tarries nigh
  Though sleep have closed her infant's eye,
  For should he wake, and find her gone,
  She knows she could not bear his moan.
  • "The Fourth Sunday after Easter", p. 102.

• Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
  Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die,
  Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
  Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh?
  • "The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity", p. 176.

• 'Tis sweet, as year by year we lose
  Friends out of sight, in faith to muse
  How grows in Paradise our store.
  • "The Burial of the Dead", p. 242.

Quotes about John Keble

• Keble's Lectures must surely be regarded as, under their pious and diffident surface, the most sensationally radical criticism of their time. They broach views of the source, the function, and the effect of literature, and of the methods by which literature is appropriately read and criticised, which, when they occur in the writings of critics schooled by Freud, are still reckoned to be the most subversive to the established values and principles of literary criticism.
  • M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), p. 145

• I do not know whether you have ever seen John Keble's Hymns. He has written a great number for most of the holidays and several of the Sundays in the year, and I believe intends to complete the series. I live in hopes that he will be induced to publish them; and it is my firm opinion that nothing equal to them exists in our language: the wonderful knowledge of Scripture, the purity of heart, and the richness of poetry which they exhibit, I never saw paralleled.
  • Thomas Arnold to H. T. Coleridge (3 March 1823), quoted in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., Late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. Vol. I (1844), p. 62

• His honours were borne with meekness and simplicity; to his attainments he joined a temper of singular sweetness and modesty, capable at the same time, when necessary, of austere strength and strictness of principle
  • Richard William Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (1891), p. 20

• He was a brilliant university scholar overlaying the plain, unworldly country parson; an old-fashioned English Churchman, with great veneration for the Church and its bishops, and a great dislike of Rome, Dissent, and Methodism, but with a quick heart; with a frank, gay humility of soul, with great contempt of appearances, great enjoyment of nature, great unselfishness, strict and severe principles of morals and duty.
  • Richard William Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (1891), p. 23

• When he read, you saw that he felt, and he made you feel, that he was the ordained servant of God; delivering His words, or leading you, but as one of like infirmities and sins with your own, in your prayers. When he preached, it was with an affectionate almost plaintive earnestness, which was very moving.
  • John Taylor Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A. Late Vicar of Hursley, Vol. II (1869), pp. 562-563

• A secure place in this gallery of English worthies is held by John Keble, Victorian Vicar of the parish of Hursley near Winchester. His ministry was peaceful, dedicated and devout, the qualities which reappear in his poetry; and to his contemporaries, he was a worthy successor to Hooker and Herbert as well as the very model of the rural parish priest, the pastor and shepherd of his people. For pious Anglicans, his name still evokes that romantic ecclesiastical Arcadia and heaven on earth... This vision of Christianity was Keble's, one intrinsically rustic and English. There was more about him, however, than the peace and plenty of the rural parsonage. Keble was also a national figure as one of the best-loved of English poets and a leader of the High Church revival. To his own generation he was a prophet in Israel, and for many Victorians, the poet of the religious world.
  • Sheridan Gilley, 'John Keble and the Victorian Churching of Romanticism', in J. R. Watson (ed.), An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism (1983), p. 226

• Much against his will, but for a great many persons of very various characters who but for him might have fallen under very different influences, he became a sort of religious "court of final appeal." When all else had been said and done, people would wait and see what came from Hursley, before they made up their minds as to the path of duty.
  • Henry Liddon, sermon preached at the opening of Keble College Chapel on St. Mark's Day (1876), quoted in An Account of the Proceedings at Keble College of the occasion of the Opening of the Chapel and the Laying of the Foundation-Stone of the Hall and Library on St. Mark's Day, 1876 with the Sermons and Speeches then Delivered and of a Description of the Chapel (1876), p. 95

• Mr. Keble's sensitive shrinking from anything like praise and observation has perhaps been the cause for the idea gaining ground that he was rather a gentle, holy man than a strong living force in Church matters. His friends, on the contrary, remember chiefly the fiery eagerness, the indignant remonstrances poured out, and the sternness of his judgment when he thought Church doctrine was being endangered. Eagle-eyed to detect danger, he allowed no one to be idle if things could be bettered by letters or protests.
  • Charlotte Moberly, Dulce Domum: George Moberly (D.C.L.; Headmaster of Winchester College, 1835–1866, Bishop of Salisbury, 1869–1885), His Family and Friends (1911), p. 78

• His happy magic made the Anglican Church seem what Catholicism was and is.
  • John Henry Newman, 'John Keble' (June 1846), quoted in John Henry Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, Volume II (1871), p. 444

• The true and primary author of it [the Oxford Movement], however, as is usual with great motive-powers, was out of sight. Having carried off as a mere boy the highest honours of the University, he had turned from the admiration which haunted his steps, and sought for a better and holier satisfaction in pastoral work in the country. Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?
  • John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), p. 75

• The Christian Year made its appearance in 1827. It is not necessary, and scarcely becoming, to praise a book which has already become one of the classics of the language. When the general tone of religious literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that time, Keble struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England. Nor can I pretend to analyze, in my own instance, the effect of religious teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful.
  • John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), p. 77

• The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of "National Apostasy." I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833.
  • John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), p. 100

• He was a tory of the old school, a cavalier, and a lover of the memory of Charles I.
  • John Henry Overton, 'Keble, John', Dictionary of National Biography, Volume XXX. Johnes—Kenneth, ed. Sidney Lee (1892), p. 292

• Oxford, from the strength of principles shown there, was becoming a rallying point for the whole kingdom. John Keble's assize sermon before the judges against the Latitudinarian government was thought indiscreet and fruitless. But these things were not so.
  • Isaac Williams, The Autobiography of Isaac Williams, B.D. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford, ed. George Prevost (1892), pp. 95-96

External links

• Works by John Keble at Project Gutenberg
• Keble's works online at Project Canterbury
• John Keble 1792-1866 at The Cyber Hymnal