Monday, 31 July 2017

New favourite windows


This newish window in St James’, Cross Roads gives me pleasure each time I go in, but all the more so yesterday when the light was streaming through it.


Meanwhile, at St Michael’s, Haworth, I’ve been doing some amateur work (substantially helped, and at a couple of points just slightly hindered, by a brilliant set of notes made for the church’s tour guides) on the East Window of 1880.  Here is just one panel, including two of twenty-six occurrences in the window of the shout of praise Te deum laudamus.

On the left, apparently not identified recently, is clearly John Keble.  He is carrying his then very popular volume of poems The Christian Year (the fact that it appears to read Christian Near may not have helped recent identification).  The hymn New every morning is the love is almost all that survives of The Christian Year in regular use today.  

Keble only died in 1866 so it is striking that he is being represented in stained glass just fourteen years later (mind you, an entire Oxford college had been opened in his memory in less than half that time).  His presence is a clear indication of the then parish priest's Anglo-Catholic leanings.

On the right is John Milton, easily identified, and portrayed as already having gone blind, with his great work Paradise Lost at his feet.

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