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after a stormy night to go down to the beach to see if any 
mariners had been cast ashore. Scores of shipwrecked sailors 
were rescued by him, taken to the vicarage and maintained 
there for days ; clothing was found for them, and help given 
them to enable them to make their way to Plymouth. All 
this was a heavy tax on Hawker’s scanty means. Such a 
splendid example of unselfishness deserves to be widely known 
in these days when the world is too much with us, and getting 
and spending we lay waste our powers. Such tender care 
for desolate mariners had not always been found at Morwen- 
stow. Hawker transformed the parish. There is much of 
sea and storm and wreck in his poems ; the spirit of the 
restless changing sea seemed to have wrought itself into his 
very being. The lonely shore with all the legends and super- 
stitions attaching to it inspired an imagination which was 
always radiant but not always clear. The moon was obscured 
by mists, yet encircled with a glorious halo. He gave to the 
ballad form of poetry the time and attention which had 
he properly appraised his powers and his gifts, and had he 
been more favourably circumstanced, he would have 
given to an epic. Even his longest work — like Christabel, 
and like the tale half told of Cambuscan bold — is only a 
fragment. To later generations the ballads have appealed 
much more than his ambitious efforts. They have the true 
ballad lilt. Some of his prose is argumentative and learned. 
A widower of sixty, Hawker married a woman of twenty, 
whose father was a Pole. His delightful love song “ The 
eyes that melt, the eyes that burn ” is associated with this 
period. There were born to him in his old age three daughters. 
That he had not been able properly to provide for his family 
was an abiding grief with him. He was not permitted safe 
to enjoy the Sabbath of his toils. 
He is pictured as a tall strongly- built man with ruddy 
complexion and piercing blue eyes, clean shaven face and fair 
hair worn long. His voice was clear, rich, and melodious. 
His dress was picturesque and quite unconventional. In 
many ways he was original and eccentric. Such a remarkable 
figure, whose mind kept the promise made by his face, belonged 
rather to the romantic days of the 16th or 17th century than 
to the prosaic 19th. Possessing the simplicity of the ages 
of faith he was projected into a period of unrest when men 
were discarding the old truths, and trying to find a golden 
harbour in seas of death and sunless gulfs of doubt. He 
disliked the dissidence of dissent, but loved Nonconformists 
personally. He was endowed with a fine sensibility. A 
man with such a temperament as his, wrapping himself up 
