This is purely conventional; how different from the "laurel's pattering talk" of Tennyson. Again: The torrent rill That winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell, Touched by the blue mist _well_. How weak a word to end a stanza! Again: The birds of heaven before us fleet, _They cannot brook our shame to meet_. How falsetto, how prejudiced a tone! And these are not isolated instances: similar infelicities occur on every page. Keble's whole view of Nature, it must be said, was onesided and wanting in insight. Nature was to him nothing but a type of mild fervour and uncomplaining patience. "All true, all faultless, all in tune," he says. To the cruelty, the waste, the ugliness, that seem so inextricably intertwined with natural processes, he diligently closed his eyes. Thus, in No. 9 of the _Lyra Innocentium_ he propagates a host of innocent superstitions as to the power of childhood over wild beasts. It surely is not poetical to say of a baby: The tiger's whelp encaged with thee Would sheathe his claws to sport and play; Bees have for thee no sting. because it is not true. Again, in the beautiful stanzas on the Second Sunday after Trinity, he sees "the many-twinkling smile of ocean" up the glade. His only thought is: Such signs of love old Ocean gives We cannot choose but think he lives. An agreeable view, but hardly consistent with the vast and barren cruelties which are as natural to the ocean as his genial presence. We do not mean that a poet is bound to insist on the harsher aspects of the case, but in a poet like Keble, who made so much of close communion with Nature, of intimate musings, it is mere blindness not to take these things into account. The fault, with Keble, was entirely in man's corrupt heart; further than that he did not care to follow it; he deliberately ignored the bewildering anomaly, the law of failure and suffering that runs through Nature, as surely as through the history of nations. How different a view it was from the view that Tennyson found grow more and more intense with advancing years--that the world was, as it were, the creation of some vast poetic heart, with its necessary concomitant of failure and incompleteness.