a great
effect upon me in many ways. He was the Rev. Robert Hawker, of
Morwenstow, in the extreme north of Cornwall.*
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* See his "LIFE," by Rev. Baring Gould.
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This friend was a poet, and a High Churchman, from whom I learned many
practical lessons. He was a man who prayed, and expected an answer; he
had a wonderful perception for realizing unseen things, and took
Scripture literally, with startling effect. He certainly was most
eccentric in many of his ways; but there was a reality and
straightforwardness about him which charmed me very much; and I was the
more drawn to him, from the interest he took in me and my work.
He knew many legends of holy men of old, and said that the patron saints
of West Cornwall were in the calendar of the Eastern Church, and those
in the north of Cornwall belonged to the Western. His own patron saint,
Morwenna, was a Saxon, and his church a Saxon fane. He talked of these
saints as if he knew all about them, and wrote of them in a volume of
poems thus:--
"They had their lodges in the wilderness,
And built them cells along the shadowy sea;
And there they dwelt with angels like a dream,
And filled the field of the evangelists
With thoughts as sweet as flowers."
He used to give most thrilling and grand descriptions of the storms of
the Atlantic, which broke upon the rocky coast with gigantic force, and
tell thrilling stories of shipwrecks; how he saved the lives of some of
the sailors, and how he recovered the bodies of others he could not
save. Then in the churchyard he would show you--there, a broken boat
turned over the resting-place of some; here, two oars set up crosswise
over several others; and in another part the figure-head of a ship, to
mark the spot where the body of a captain was buried.
The Vicarage house was as original as himself. Over the door was
inscribed--
"A house, a glebe, a pound a day;
A pleasant place to watch and pray.
Be true to Church, be kind to poor,
O minister, fo