My hair is gray, but not with years, As men's have grown from sudden fears: My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil, But rusted with a vile repose, But this was for my father's faith Proud of Persecution's rage; Three were in a dungeon cast, There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, And in each ring there is a chain; For in these limbs its teeth remain, With marks that will not wear away, Till I have done with this new day, Which now is painful to these eyes, Which have not seen the sun so rise For years I cannot count them o'er, I lost their long and heavy score When my last brother droop'd and died, And I lay living by his side. They chain'd us each to a column stone, A grating sound not full and free ment. JOHN KEBLE. 1792-1866. JOHN KEBLE was born on St. Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, He was elected Scholar of Corpus, Oxford, in his fifteenth, and Fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year. After a few years of tutorship at Oxford and curacy in the country, he became Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire in 1839, where he continued to minister till his death in 1866. He was with Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey regarded as forming the Triumvirate of the Oxford Catholic move. His prose works consist of an elaborate edition of Hooker, a careful Life of Bishop Wilson, and various theological treatises. But it is as a poet much more than a scholar or a controversialist that he is known; and of his poetical works, the Lyra Innocentium, the Translation of the Psalter, a posthumous volume of Poems, and The Christian Year (1827), it is by the last that he acquired an universal and undying fame in English literature. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he wrote in Latin Praelections on Poetry, which are remarkable both for their subtlety and their exquisite Latinity. His Life was written by his friend Mr. Justice Coleridge.] |