41 6 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED
Raphael s cartoons from the Penny Magazine. He was articled to a Lincoln architect, who set him to draw all the figures about the cathedral. For a time he studied at the Royal Academy in 1843, an d showed his first picture at Liver pool in 1847. He became teacher of drawing at the Wesleyan Normal College in Westminster in 1851, a post which he filled for twenty-six years. He married the teacher of one of the schools there, and moved to Stoke Newington in 1856. John Ruskin and D. G. Rossetti were his warm and true friends. He was a devoted Methodist class-leader at Stoke Newington. His Letters have taken high rank for their rich thought and lovely expression. Religion was ever present to him, earnest, real, the one important moulder and factor of his life. He says of the peace of God, It lies round you like an atmosphere. It dwells in you like a fragrance. It goes from you like a subtle elixir vitae. I want not fame, but life; the soul s calm sunshine; life in the eye of God. In 1877 the mental illness which clouded his last years came upon him. He died in 1889. He rests in Highgate Cemetery, with the text on his gravestone, I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.
Rossetti called Smetham the Blake of the nineteenth century. He allowed an exhibition of Smetham s pictures to be held in his studio in 1878. This morning, he wrote, the pictures arrived, and many of them have quite delighted and astonished me by their extreme beauty. Indeed they are, in colour, sentiment, and nobility of thought, only to be classed with the very flower of modern art.
Hymn 818. Almighty Maker of my frame. ANNE STEELE (255).
1 When I resolved to watch my thoughts, Psalm xxxix., was pub lished in her Poems, 1760. This cento, verses 4, 5, 6, 7, is given in Rippon s Baptist Selection, 1787, as a hymn on The Shortness of Life.
Miss Steele modelled her first two verses on the first two verses of Dr. Watts s version of Ps. xxxix. 4-10, but she greatly improved on her original
Teach me the measure of my days,
Thou Maker of my frame ! I would survey life s narrow space,
And learn how frail I am.
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