Tales of the Ridings | Page 5

take his share--it was, in truth, much more than his share--in increasing the yield of the soil. All this, with a host of miscellaneous duties which he voluntarily shouldered, had put an undue strain upon his strength. Yet, with his usual buoyancy, he had seemed to stand it all without flagging; and even when warned by the army medical authorities that his heart showed some weakness, he had paid little heed to the warning, had certainly in no way allowed it either to interfere with his various undertakings or to prey upon his spirits.
The Armistice naturally brought some relief. Among other things, it opened the prospect of the return of his colleagues and a considerable lightening both of his professional and of his manifold civic duties. He was, moreover, much encouraged--as a man of his modest, almost diffident, nature was bound to be--by the recognition which _Songs of the Ridings_ had brought from every side: not least from the dalesmen, for whom and under whose inspiration they were written. And all his friends rejoiced to think that a new and brighter horizon seemed opening before him. Those who saw him during these last months thought that he had never been so buoyant. They felt that a new hope and a new confidence had entered into his life.
These hopes were suddenly cut off. He had passed most of August and the first week of September (1919) at his cottage in Lytton Dale, keeping the morning of his birthday (8th September), as he always delighted to do, with his wife and children. In the afternoon he went down to bathe in the river, being himself an excellent swimmer, and wishing to teach his two younger children an art in which he had always found health and keen enjoyment. He swam across the pool and called on his daughter to follow him. Noticing that she was in some difficulty, he jumped in again to help her, but suddenly sank to the bottom, and was never seen alive again. An angler ran up to help from a lower reach of the stream, and brought the girl safely to land. Then, for the first time learning that her father had sunk, he dived and dived again in the hope of finding him before it was too late. But the intense cold of the water baffled all his efforts, and the body was not recovered until some hours later. It is probable that the chill of the pool had caused a sudden failure of Moorman's heart--a heart already weakened by the excessive strain of the last few years--and it is little likely that, after he had once sunk, he could ever have been saved.
The death of Moorman called forth expressions of grief and of grateful affection, so strong and so manifestly sincere as to bring something of surprise even to his closest friends. Much more surprising would they have been to himself. They came from every side, from lettered and unlettered, from loom and dale, from school and university. Nothing could prove more clearly how strong was the hold he had won upon all who knew him, how large the place he filled in the heart of his colleagues and the county of his adoption. It was a fitting tribute to a literary achievement of very distinctive originality. It was also, and above all, a tribute, heartfelt and irrepressible, to the charm of a singularly bright and winning spirit: to a life which had spent itself, without stint and without one thought of self, in the service of others.
Endnotes (were footnotes):
(1) To this family is believed to have belonged John Moreman, Canon and eventually Dean of Exeter (though he died, October, 1554, "before he was presented to the Deanery"), of whom an account will be found in Prince's Worthies of Devon (ed. 1701, pp. 452-453), as well as in Wood's Athenoe and Fasti Oxonienses and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. He was "the first in those days to teach his parishioners to say the Lord's Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments in the English tongue" (whether the contrast is with Latin or Cornish, for he was then Vicar of Menynhed, in East Cornwall, does not appear). He was imprisoned, as a determined Catholic, in Edward VI.'s reign, but "enlarged under Queen Mary, with whom he grew into very great favour," and was chosen to defend the doctrine of Transubstantiation before the Convocation of 1553.
(2) His thesis for this degree, on _The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare_, was published in 1905.
(3) He published editions of The Faithful Shepherdess, _The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Two Noble Kinsmen_ in 1897, and an elaborately critical edition of Herrick's Poems, in completion of his Study, in 1915. He also contributed the chapter on "Shakespeare's