[Footnote: See below, p. 212.] Destined by his
mother to peaceful pursuits, he wavered from the outset between two forces,
religious devotion and a passion for worldly comfort and distinction. For a
long period the latter had the upper hand, and his life has been described
by his best editor, Professor George Herbert Palmer, as twenty-seven years
of vacillation and three of consecrated service. Appointed Public Orator,
or showman, of his university, Cambridge, he spent some years in enjoying
the somewhat trifling elegancies of life and in truckling to the great.
Then, on the death of his patrons, he passed through a period of intense
crisis from which he emerged wholly spiritualized. The three remaining
years of his life he spent in the little country parish of Bemerton, just
outside of Salisbury, as a fervent High Church minister, or as he preferred
to name himself, priest, in the strictest devotion to his professional
duties and to the practices of an ascetic piety which to the usual American
mind must seem about equally admirable and conventional. His religious
poems, published after his death in a volume called 'The Temple,' show
mainly two things, first his intense and beautiful consecration to his
personal God and Saviour, which, in its earnest sincerity, renders him
distinctly the most representative poet of the Church of England, and
second the influence of Donne, who was a close friend of his mother.
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