In consideration of the feelings of certain old parishioners, and the other more pressing needs, as well as of the patience with which so great an enterprise needed in his mind to be contemplated, nine years had elapsed since his incumbency had begun before he wrote: “We are stirring about our Church, and next spring I hope really to go to work; you must come and see the plans first, or else hereafter for ever hold your peace in respect of alleging impediments. One feels that one’s advanced age has not rendered one fitted to set about such works; but really the irreverence and other mischiefs caused by the present state of Hursley Church seem to leave one no choice.” The step that had first been taken was one for which many generations far and wide have reason to be grateful, the arrangement and publication of the _Lyra Innocentium_, to a certain degree on the lines of the _Christian Year_, so as to have one poem appropriated to each Sunday and holy day (though these were only fully marked off in a later edition). The book is perhaps less universally read than the _Christian Year_, and is more unequal, some poems rising higher and into greater beauty, some deeper and showing that the soul had made further progress in these twenty years, some very simple in structure, fit for little children, yet with a grave and solemn thought in the last verse. Those that are specially full of Hursley atmosphere, on events connected with the author, may be touched on here. “Christmas Eve Vespers” was suggested by the schoolmaster’s little daughter going into church before the decoration had been put up, and exclaiming, disappointed, “No Christmas!” “The Second Sunday in Lent” recalls, in the line on “the mimic rain on poplar leaves,” the sounds made by a trembling aspen, whose leaves quivered all through the summer evenings, growing close to the house of Mr. Keble’s life-long friend and biographer, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, at Ottery St. Mary. An engraving of Raffaelle’s last picture “The Transfiguration” hung in the Vicarage drawing-room.