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Musings
Over the “Christian Year” and “Lyra
Innocentium.” By Charlotte Mary Yonge;
together with a few Gleanings of Recollections
of the Rev. John Keble, gathered by several
friends
Online text of Musings
over the Christian Year
Musings over the
Christian Year and Lyra Innocentium
includes the following:
"Gleanings from Thirty Years’
Intercourse with the Late Rev. John Keble”
p. i – lvi
"Recollections of
Hursley Vicarage,” by Frances M. Wilbraham,
p. lvii – cxxxvii
"The Fairford
and Hursley Windows,” p. cxxxviii–
cxlviii
" ‘Quanto men si mostra,
tanto è piu bella,’ ” p.
cxlix– clxii
"A Few Words of
Personal Description,” by the Rev. T.
Simpson Evans, Plumstead Common, p. clxiii–
clxv
Extract
from this book – King Charles the Martyr
Click here to see a
made available by Project Canterbury
What
did they think at the time?
The New Englander and Yale Review published comments
on Yonge's Musings in its Notices of New Books section (under the
heading Miscellaneous ! ) (Volume 30, Issue 116 July 1871 pp. 544-545
– Cornell University Library).
The text is as follows:
MUSINGS OVER THE CHRISTIAN YEAR.*~The subject
of this book—Keble and his “Christian Year,” now among
the religious classics of our language—will attract a multitude of
readers; and a more miscellaneous circle will be drawn to the principal
writer when she is recognized as the author of “The Heir of Redclyffe,”
“Heartsease,” and other popular tales. For both reasons it can
not fail to be pleasant reading. Of course it is churchy, yet not being
combative nor obtrusively dogmatic, and dealing with sentiment rather
than with argument and in a kindly and reverent way, it may find favor
with Christians generally, and even with the milder sort of radicals.
The “Musings” may be most conveniently read at intervals in
connection with the several poems that have occasioned them, and can scarcely
be appreciated otherwise. The “Recollections,” however, which
occupy the first third of the volume, may be read independently. They
consist chiefly of “Gleanings from thirty years’ intercourse
with the late Rev. John Keble,” by Miss Yonge, and “Recollections
of Hursley l.Ticarage,” by Frances M. Wllbraham. And most cordial
and graceful tributes they are to the man who is called “a saint,
a poet, a scholar and a pastor,” and to his congenial family and
home. Only women, and such women, could have written thus. Particularly
in these few pages of Miss Yonge we have exquisite etchings, in her own
felicitous style, of the vicar and the vicarage, his person, mind and
manners, his festivals and schools, his marked individuality and domestic
and pastoral surroundings, all as seen through an affectionate intimacy
of many years. As we read, we seem to breathe the atmosphere of that English
home and parish. Hursley is linked with Keble as Bemerton with Herbert.
It seems to have come as near as any other to realizing the ideal of Anglo-Catholicism
before it flowered or degenerated into the later “ritualism.”
The picture, while evidently drawn to the life, has the look of an earlier
time. For ourselves individually we confess to liking it not the less
because it takes on no supercilious airs of“the nineteenth century.”
English ecclesiasticism, whatever mixture it has of truth and error, gets
much of its hold on minds at once devout and cultured through the alliance
here shown with poetry and art. The authors of the Oxford Tracts could
not have done their work without Keble. The extent of his pastoral supervision—which,
like Herbert’s, may be cited as a model in some other branches of
the church—is seen in the fact mentioned by Miss Yonge, that while
preparing for Confirmation she went to him twice a week from August to
October, and afterward his care of others was yet fuller and more minute.
We have most pleasing glimpses also of his relation to her as a partial
yet fastidious critic of her earlier writings in the stages of their composition.
As might be expected, thoroughly amiable as he was, his ecclesiastical
prepossessions could warp his judgments and contract his sympathies. With
our sturdier Puritan traditions we are still amused rather than offended
when he betrays prejudice against Milton, and still more when he loves
and venerates Charles I. as “our own, our royal Saint,” while
acknowledging his “failures in truth !“ The more we see of diversity
in the materials brought together in the true church, and here and there
even mutual repugnance between them, the more account we will make of
the one only foundation. The true Israelites are not all of the same tribe,
but “Verily, Thou art our Father!”
* Musings Over the “Ohristian Year” and “Lyra
Innocentium.” By CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE; together with a few Gleanings
of Recollections of the Rev. John Keble, gathered by several friends.
New York D. Appleton & Co. 1871. 12mo. pp. 431.
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