Listening to the bells of some such church, Charles
Tennyson writes —

" Follow the sound, and it will lead thee on
Into an English church, the home of Prayer,
For who shall say she is not lovelier there,
Than in all other fanes beneath the Sun?
There, if thou doubtest, may it not impart
Fresh hope, to learn that others' hope is sure?
There, duly as the merchant to the mart,



GRASBY. 47

Come aged men, whom daily death makes fewer ;
There all the spirit of a Christian heart
Is bodied forth in gentle rites and pure.''

Some of the brightest intellects of our century,
men whose names through their works are household
words, have, after a brilliant college career, passed
their lives in a quiet rural parish.
Keble, Kingsley, and Charles Tennyson may thus
be linked together, from the similarity of their
attainments, the choice of their profession, and the
manner of their after lives.
When a student at Oriel no one was more looked
up to than the author of " The Christian Year," yet
Keble retired from the intellectual society of Oxford
to spend the rest of his days preaching and minister-
ing to the farmers and hinds of Hursley.
Kingsley at Magdalen astonished his tutor with
the way in which his mind grasped the most
abstruse questions ; but abandoning the idea of
a lucrative profession, the author of " Westward Ho ! "
decided for the Church, passing the remainder of his
life as rector of Eversley.
A somewhat similar life was Charles Tennyson's. At
Cambridge, owing to his having gained a Bell scholar-



48



GRASBY.
