of a religious life. A book of poems, breathing faith and worship
at all points, and in all attitudes of heavenward contemplation,
within the circle of the Christian Year, would, he hoped, restore in
many minds to many a benumbed form life and energy.

In 1825, while the poems of the Christian Year were gradually being
shaped into a single work, a brother became able to relieve John
Keble in that pious care for which his father had drawn him away
from a great University career, and he then went to a curacy at
Hursley, four or five miles from Winchester.

In 1827--when its author's age was thirty-five--"The Christian Year"
was published. Like George Herbert, whose equal he was in piety
though not in power, Keble was joined to the Church in fullest
sympathy with all its ordinances, and desired to quicken worship by
putting into each part of the ritual a life that might pass into and
raise the life of man. The spirit of true religion, with a power
beyond that of any earthly feuds and controversies, binds together
those in whom it really lives. Setting aside all smaller questions
of the relative value of different earthly means to the attainment
of a life hidden with Christ in God, Christians of all forms who are
one in spirit have found help from "John Keble's Christian Year, and
think of its guileless author with kindly affection. Within five-
and-twenty years of its publication, a hundred thousand copies had
been sold. The book is still diffused so widely, in editions of all
forms, that it may yet go on, until the circle of the years shall be
no more, living and making live.

Four years after "The Christian Year appeared, Keble was appointed
(in 1831) to the usual five years' tenure of the Poetry