Since all that is not Heaven must fade, Light be the hand of Ruin laid Upon the home I love. With lulling spell let soft decay Steal on, and spare the giant sway, The crash of tower and grove. In such a mood it is so easy to be jealous, to be vindictive, to lose the central thought in invective or unconvincing particularisation. Again, in a frame of mind that easily drifts into morbidity and despondency, with what pure patience he delineates the vague languors, the unutterable discontents of the soft days of early spring, in the poem for the third Sunday after Easter: Well may I guess and feel Why autumn should be sad, But vernal airs should sorrow heal, Spring should be gay and glad. Yet as along this violet bank I rove, The languid sweetness seems to choke my breath, I sit me down beside the hazel grove, And sigh, and half could wish my weariness were death. And what could be more supremely delicate, more touched with a loving humiliation, than the exquisite line (in the poem on Gunpowder Treason, of all places!), Speak gently of our sister's fall. (3) Gravity.--This may be held perhaps to be almost a defect of quality; but in Keble it has a positive value. He, a clerical Wordsworth, so to speak, moved through the world, not indeed without some simple merriment, but without a suspicion of the existence of that deeper and larger mood that we name humour. He never cared to note the odd, bewildering contradictions of humanity, its reckless absurdities, its profound and intimate mirth. Keble's smile, and he is said to have had one, was the grave, bright smile of the contented and joyful spirit, not the secret and refreshing twinkle of the humourist. Indeed, the spirit sickens to recall the pieces resolutely labelled humorous, which have been shamefully made public among his miscellaneous poems. If these were specimens of the wit in which his talk is said to have abounded, it is a matter for deep thankfulness that so few reminiscences of his conversation have survived.