Chapter 3

'Thus haue I back again to thy bright name,Fair floud of holy fires! transfus'd the flameI took from reading thee....... O pardon, if I dare to sayThine own dear bookes are guilty.' (vol. i. p. 150.)

The words of the Preface (as above) remind us also that Crashaw took his part in the Fasts and Vigils and austerities of the Ferrars and the saintly, if ascetic, 'Little Gidding' group.[18]Going back on the 'Hymn,' such lines as these show how even then the Poet had drunk-in the very passion of Teresa:e.g.

'Loue toucht her heart, and, lo, it beatesHigh, and burnes with such braue heates,Such thirsts to dy, as dares drink vpA thousand cold deathes in one cup.Good reason: for she breathes all fire;Her white breast heaues with strong desire.. . . . . . . .Sweet, not so fast! lo, thy fair Spouse,Whom thou seekst with so swift vowes,Calls thee back, and bidds thee comeT'embrace a milder martyrdom.Blest powres forbid thy tender lifeShould bleed vpon a barbarous knife:Or some base hand have power to razeThy brest's chast cabinet, and vncaseA soul kept there so sweet: O no,Wise Heaun will neuer haue it so.Thou art Love's victime, and must dyA death more mystical and high:Into Loue's armes thou shalt let fallA still-suruiuing funerall.His is the dart must make the deathWhose stroke shall tast thy hallow'd breath;A dart thrice dipt in that rich flameWhich writes thy Spouse's radiant nameVpon the roof of Heau'n, where ayIt shines; and with a soueraign rayBeates bright vpon the burning facesOf soules which in that Name's sweet gracesFind everlasting smiles. . . .O how oft shalt thou complainOf a sweet and subtle pain;Of intolerable ioyes;Of a death, in which who dyesLoues his death, and dyes again,And would for ever so be slain,And liues and dyes; and knowes not whyTo live, but that he thus may neuer leaue to dy.'

It is deeply significant to find such a Hymn as that written while 'yet among the Protestants.' Putting the two things together—(a) his recluse, shy, meditative life 'under Tertullian's roofe of angels,' and his prayersTHEREin the night; (b) his passionately sympathetic reading, as of Teresa, and going forth of his most spiritual yearnings after the 'sweet and subtle pain,' and Love's death 'mystical and high'—we get at the secret of the 'change' now being considered. However led to it, Crashaw's reading lay among books that were as fuel to fire brought to a naturally mystical and supersensitive temperament; and however formed and nurtured, such self-evidently was his temperament. His innate mysticismdrew him to such literature, and the literature fed what perchance demanded rather to be neutralised.[19]I feel satisfied one main element of the attraction of Roman Catholicism for him was the nutriment and nurture for his profoundest though most perilous spiritual experiences in its Writers. His great-brained, strong-thewed father would have dismissed such 'intolerable ioyes' as morbid sentimentalism; but the nervous, finely and highly-strung organisation of his son was as an Æolian harp under their touch. To all this must be added certain local influences, and ultimately the crash of the Ejection. The history of the University during the period of Crashaw's residence makes it plain that there was then, as later, a revival of what may be technically called Ritualism—as an intended help-meet to Faith—and that by some of the most cultured and gracious scholars of the Colleges. I am not vindicating, much less judging such, any more than would I 'sit in judgment' on the Ritualist revival of our own day,i.e.of its adherents. For myself, I find it a diviner and grander thing to 'walk by faith' rather than by 'sight,' and not 'bodied' but 'disembodied truth' the more spiritual. But to not a few—and to such as Crashaw—the sensible, the visible, the actually looked-at—sanctified with the hoar of centuries—light up and etherealise. Contemporary records show that the chapel of Peterhouse—Crashaw's college—which was built in 1632, and consecrated by Francis White, Bishop of Ely, was a 'handsome' one, having a beautiful ceiling and a noble east window—its glass 'hid away in the troublesome times.' Among the benefactors to its building were (afterwards bishops) Cosin and Wren, and also Shelford, whose 'Five learnedDiscourses' were graced with a noticeable 'commendatory poem' by Crashaw (vol. ii. pp. 162-5). Before this chapel was built the society made use of the chancel of the adjacent church of Little St. Mary's, into which there was a door from Peterhouse College. The reader may at this point turn to our poet's heart-broken 'pleadings' for the 'restoration' of his College, now made 'to speak English.' On all which, and the like, dear old Fuller, in his History of the University, thus speaks, under a somewhat later date (1642), butthevery turning-period with Crashaw: 'Now began the University to be much beautified in buildings; every college, after casting its skin with the snake, or renewing its bill with the eagle, having their courts, or at least their fronts and gatehouse, repaired and adorned. But the greatest attention was in their chapels, most of them being graced with the accession of organs,' &c.

Contemporary records farther lead us to Peterhouse and Pembroke Colleges as specially 'visited' and 'spoiled' in the Commission from the Parliament in 1643 to remove crosses. We may read one 'report' out of many. 'Mr. Horscot: We went to Peterhouse, 1643, Dec. 21, with officers and soldiers, and [in] the presence [of] Mr. Wilson, of the president Mr. Francis, Mr. Maxy and other Fellows, Dec. 20 and 23, we pulled down two mighty great angells with wings, and divers other angells and the four Evangelists and Peter with his keies, over the Chappell Dore, and about a hundred cherubims and angells and divers superstitious letters in gold; and at the upper end of the chancel these words were written as followeth: "Hic locus est Domini Dei, nil aliud et Porta cœli." Witness, Will. Dowsing, Geo. Long.' Farther: 'These words were written at Keie's Coll. and not at Peterhouse, but about the walls were written in Latin, "We prays thee ever;" and on some of the images was written "Sanctus, Sanctus,Sanctus;" or other, "Gloria Dei et Gloria Patri," and "Non nobis Domine;" and six angells in the windowes.' So at Pembroke, 'We brake and pulled down 80 superstitious pictures;' and so at Little St. Mary's, 'We brake down 60 superstitious pictures, some Popes and crucifixes and God the Father sitting in a chayer and holding a glass in his hand.' Looking on the since famous names of Peterhouse and Pembroke (Spenser's college)—Cosin, Wren, Shelford, Tournaye, Andrewes—they at once suggest ritualistic, if not Roman Catholic, proclivities.

Thus from all sides came potent influences of personal friendship—of his friends and associates more onward—to give impulse andmomentumto Crashaw's mystical Roman-Catholic sympathies. The 'Ejection' of 1644 found Crashaw in the very heart of these influences, not swayed simply, but mastered by them. To one so secluded and unworldly, a crisis in which the pillars of the throne were shattered, and in which not the many for the one, but the one rather than the many, must be sacrificed, was a dazing bewilderment, and terror, and agony. All was chaos and weltering confusion; no resting-place in England for his dove-feet: dissonance, blasphemy as he weened, came to his shuddering heart: he saw the lifting-up of anchors never before lifted, and the Church drifting, drifting away aimlessly and helplessly (as he misjudged). Moses-like, he looked this way and that way, and saw no man—saw not The Man—and failed, I fear, to look UP, because of his very agony of looking down and in. And so, in his tremor and sorrow and weariness, he passed over to Roman Catholicism as the 'ideal' of his reading, and as the 'home' of the sainted ones whose words were as manna to his spirit. Not a strong, defiant, masterful soul, by any means—frail, timorous, shrinking, rather—he would 'fly away,' even if out to the wilderness, to be 'at rest.' The very 'inner life' of God was in his soft gentle heart, andthat he carried with him through after-years, as Cowley bore brave witness by his magnanimous title of 'Saint.' Conscience too—ill-instructed possibly, yet true to its light, if true also to feelings that ought to have been wrestled with, not succumbed to—went with him: and what of God's grace is in a man keeps him, wherever ecclesiastically he may abide.

Such is our solution of the 'change' of Crashaw from Protestantism to Catholicism. It is sheer fanaticism to rave against the 'change,' and to burrow for ignoble motives. Gross ignorance of the facts of the period is betrayed by any one who harshly 'judges' that the humble 'ejected Fellow' made a worldly 'gain' by his 'change.' Nay verily, it was no 'gain,' in that paltry sense, for an Englishman then to become a Roman Catholic. It was to invite obloquy, misconstruction, 'evil-speaking.' In Crashaw's case he had wealthy uncles and aunts, and other relatives, who should have amply provided for him, and 'sheltered' him through the 'troublous times.' Prynne's 'Legenda Lignea, with an Answer to Mr. Birchley's Moderator (pleading for a Toleration of Popery) and a Character of some hopeful saints revolted to the Church of Rome' (1653), is brutal as it is inaccurate; but it must be adduced as an example of what 'Revolters' (so called) had to endure, albeit Crashaw was gone into the silences whither no clamour reaches, when the bitter book came forth. 'Master Richard Crashaw (son to the London divine, and sometime Fellow of St. Peterhouse in Cambridge) is another slip of the times that is transplanted to Rome. This peavish sillie seeker glided away from his principles in a poetical vein of fancy and impertinent curiosity, and finding that verses and measured flattery took and much pleased some female wits, Crashaw crept by degrees into favour and acquaintance with some court ladies, and with the gross commendationsof their parts and beauties (burnished and varnished with some other agreeable adulations) he got first the estimation of an innocent, harmless convert; and a purse being made by some deluded, vain-glorious ladies and their friends, the poet was despatched on a pilgrimage to Rome, where, if he had found in the see Pope Urban the Eighth instead of Pope Innocent, he might possibly have received a greater quantity and a better number of benedictions; for Urban was as much a pretender to be prince and œcumenical patron of poets as head of the Church; but Innocent being more harsh and dry, the poor small poet Crashaw met with none of the generation and kindred of Mecænas, nor any great blessing from his Holiness; which misfortune puts the pitiful wier-drawer to a humour of admiring his own raptures; and in this fancy (like Narcissus) he is fallen in love with his own shadow, conversing with himself in verse, and admiring the birth of his own brains; he is only laughed at, or at most but pitied, by his few patrons, who, conceiving him unworthy of any preferment in their Church, have given him leave to live (like a lean swine almost ready to starve) in a poor mendicant quality; and that favour is granted only because Crashaw can rail as satirically and bitterly at true religion in verse as others of his grain and complexion can in prose and loose discourses: this fickle shuttlecock, so tost with every changeable puff and blast, is rather to be laughed at and scorned for his ridiculous levity than imitated in his sinful and notorious apostacy and revolt' (cxxxviii.).

The short and crushing answer to all this Billingsgate is: The poems of Crashaw are now fully before the reader, and he will not find, from the first page to the last, one line answering to Prynne's jaundiced representations: 'flatteries,' 'adulations,' 'railings,' you look for in vain. The wistfulness of persuasion of the Verse-Letter to the Countess of Denbigh would have been trampled on as ablind man or a boor tramples on a bed of pansies, by the grim lawyer-Puritan. Then, the very lowliness and (alleged) mendicancy of his post in the Church of Rome might have suggested a grain of charity, seeing that worldly advancement could not be motive to an all-but friendless scholar. As to the 'birth of his own brains,' and 'conversing with himself in verse,' would that we had more such 'births' and 'conversings'! Other accusations are malignant gossip, where they are not nonsense. Far different is the spirit of Dr. John Bargrave; whose MS. has at last been worthily edited and published for the Camden Society.[20]His notice of Crashaw at Rome is as follows: 'When I went first of my four times to Rome, there were there four revolters to the Roman Church that had been Fellows of Peterhouse in Cambridge with myself. The name of one of them was Mr. R. Crashaw, who was one of theSeguita(as their term is): that is, an attendant or of the followers of this Cardinal, for which he had a salary of crowns by the month (as the custom is), but no diet. Mr. Crashaw infinitely commended his Cardinal, but complained extremely of the wickedness of those of his retinue; of which he, having the Cardinal's ear, complained to him. Upon which the Italians fell so far out with him that the Cardinal, to secure his life, was fain to put him from his service, and procuring him some small employ at the Lady's of Loretto; whither he went on pilgrimage in summer time, and, overheating himself, died in four weeks after he came thither, and it was doubtful whether he was not poisoned' (p. 37). That brings before us a true, white-souled Man 'of God,' resolute to'speak out,' whoever sinned in his sight; and it is blind sectarianism to deny that, from the noble and holy Loyola to our own Faber and Spencer and the living Newman, the Church of Rome has never been without dauntless preachers of the very righteousness of God, or unhesitant rebukers of the wickedness, immoralities, and frivolities of their co-religionists. The suspicion of 'poyson' I am unwilling to accept. Onward I shall give our recovered record of his death. Summarily, then, the 'change' of Crashaw from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism had its root and carries its solution in his 'mystical' dreamy temperament and yearnings, as these were over-encouraged instead of controlled; and as formative influences there were—(a) his reading in Teresa and kindred literature, until not 'hands,' but brain and heart, imagination and fancy, grew into the elements wherein they wrought—as one finds sprays of once-green moss and delicate-carven ferns changed by the dripping limestone into limestone: (b) the ritualistic revival being in the hands of those most loved and trusted, and from whom he fetched whatever of spiritual life and peace and joy and hope was in him—these too being of stronger will, and decisive in opinion and action—his vague 'feeling-after' rest was centred in the Rest of ideal Roman Catholicism: (c) the confusions and strifes of the transition-period of the Commonwealth terrified and wounded him; he mistook the crash of falling scaffolding, whose end was served, for the falling of the everlasting skies; saw not their serene shining beyond the passing clouds, lightning-charged for divine clarifying; and a 'quiet retreat,' which Imagination beckoned him to, won him to 'hide' there his weeping and dismay. Nothing sordid or expedient, or facing-both-ways, or unworthy, moved him to 'change.' Every one who has self-respect based on self-knowledge, and who thus has experienced the mystery of his deepestbeliefs, will make all gentlest allowances, hold all tenderest sympathies with him, and feel the coarse abuse of Prynne and later as a personal wrong. Richard Crashaw was a true 'man of God,' and acted, I believe, in sensitive allegiance to his conscience as it spake to him. 'Change,' even fundamental change, in such a man is to be accepted without reserve as 'honest' and righteous and God-fearing. He dared not sign the 'Solemn League and Covenant,' however 'solemn' it might be to others; and so he went out.[21]I pass to—

II.His friends and associates, as celebrated in his writings.I use the word 'Writings' here rather than 'Poems,' because in his Epistles,e.g.to the 'Epigrammata' and those printed by us for the first time, as well as in his Poetry, names are found over which one pauses instinctively. Commencing with his school-days at the Charterhouse, there is Robert Brooke, 'Master' ('Preceptor') from 1628 to 1643.[22]Very little has come down to us concerninghim, and the present head of the renowned School has been unable to add to Alexander Chalmers' testimony, 'A very celebrated Master.' All the more have I pleasure in inviting attention to the new 'Epistola' and related poems addressed to him, and which must be studied along with the previous poem, 'Ornatissimo viro præceptori suo colendissimo, Magistro Brook' (vol. ii. pp. 319); and perhaps the humorous and genial serio-comic celebration of 'Priscianus' grew from some school-incident (vol. ii. pp. 308, 315) having in the latter year, like Crashaw, been 'ejected' from the Charterhouse for not taking the 'Solemn League and Covenant.' He had been usher from 1626 to 1628. An apartment in the building is still called from him Brooke Hall ('Chronicles,' pp. 129, 159).

The next prominent name is that of Benjamin Lany—sometimes Laney, as in Masson's Milton (i. 97)—afterwards successively Bishop of Peterborough and Lincoln and Ely. We have already noted his marked Protestantism in the verse-eulogy of the elder Crashaw, so that probably it was as his father's son, Lany, then Master of Pembroke, received our Worthy there. Lany was of the 'ejected' in 1644. The present Bishop of Ely, with all willingness to help us, found nomss.or biographic materials in his custody. When may we hope each bishopric will find a qualified historian-biographer? A portrait of Lany is in the Master's Lodge at the Charterhouse ('Chronicles,' 1847, p. 140).

Crashaw's tutor at Pembroke was 'Master Tournay,' to whose praise and friendship he dedicates a Latin poem (vol. ii. pp. 371 et sqq.). Dr. Ward, Master of Sidney College, writes to Archbishop Usher thus of him: 'We havehad some doings here of late about one of Pembroke Hall, who, preaching in St. Mary's, about the beginning of Lent, upon that text, James ii. 22, seemed to avouch the insufficiency of faith to justification, and to impugn the doctrine of our 11th Article, of Justification by faith only; for which he was convented by the Vice-Chancellor, who was willing to accept of an easy acknowledgment; but the same party preaching his Latin sermon,pro Gradu, the last week, upon Rom. iii. 28, he said he came notpalinodiam canere, sed eandem cantilenam canere; which moved our Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Love, to call for his sermon, which he refused to deliver. Whereupon, upon Wednesday last, being Barnaby Day, the day appointed for the admission of the Bachelors of Divinity, which must answerDie Comitiorum, he was stayed by the major part of the suffrages of the Doctors of the faculty.... The truth is, there are some Heads among us that are great abettors of M. Tournay, the party above mentioned, who, no doubt, are backed by others' (June 14, 1643. Life of Parr, p. 470: Willmott, 1st series, pp. 302-3). In relation to Tournay's heresy on 'Justification,' it is profoundly interesting, biographically, to remember Crashaw's most striking Latin poems—so carelessly overlooked, if not impudently suppressed, by Turnbull—first published by Crashaw in the volume of 1648, viz. 'Fides, quæ sola justificat, non est sine spe et dilectione,' and 'Baptismus non tollit futura peccata.' The student will do well to turn to these two poems in their places (vol. ii. pp. 209, 216).[23]

Robert Shelford, 'of Ringsfield in Suffolk, Priest,' wasanother 'suspect:' as in Huntley's [ = Prynne]Breviate(3d ed. 1637, p. 308) we read, 'Master Shelford hath of late affirmed in print, that the Pope was never yet defined to be the Antichrist by any Synods.' More vehemently writes Usher to Dr. Ward (Sept. 15, 1635): 'But while we strive here to maintain the purity of our ancient truth, how cometh it to pass that you at Cambridge do cast such stumbling-blocks in our way, by publishing unto the world such rotten stuff as Shelford hath vented in his Five Discourses; wherein he hath so carried himselfut famosi Perni amanuensem possis agnoscere. The Jesuits of England sent over the book hither to assure them that we are now coming home to them as fast as we can. I pray God this sin be not deeply laid to their charge, who give an occasion to our blind thus to stumble' (as before). It was to these 'Five Discourses' our Poet furnished a 'commendatory' poem—given by us unmutilated from the volume (vol. i. pp. 162-5). Shelford, like his friend, was of Peterhouse. Another college-friend was William Herrys (or Herries or Harris), who was of Essex. He died in October 1631. He was of Pembroke and Christ's. The poems and 'Epitaph' consecrated to his memory are in various ways remarkable. But beyond a few college-dates, I have failed to recover notices of him. He seems to have been to Crashaw what young King was to Milton and his fellow-students (vol. i. pp. 220-30; vol. ii. pp. 378 et sqq.).[24]So with James Stanninow (or Staninough), 'fellow of Queene'sColledge'—the poem on whose death was first printed by us (vol. i. pp. 290-92). He has a Latin poem prefixed to Isaacson's 'Chronology' (our vol. i. pp. 246-49).[25]So too with 'Master Chambers,' of the fine pathetic hitherto anonymous poem 'Vpon the death of a Gentleman' (vol. i. pp. 218-19). Neither have I been able to add one syllable to the name and heading: 'An Epitaph vpon Mr. Ashton, a conformable citizen.' Wren, Cosin, and others of Cambridge, not being named by Crashaw, do not come under these remarks. The new poems on Dr. Porter (vol. i. pp. 293-4), Dr. Mansell (vol. ii. p. 323), and others, explain themselves—with our notes. Of Cardinal Palotta, or Palotto, we get most satisfying glimpses in Dr. Bargrave's volume (already quoted). The Protestant Canon's testimony is: 'He is very papable [placable], and esteemed worthy by all, especially the princes that know his virtue and qualities, being a man of angelical life; and Rome would be glad to see him Pope, to pull down the pride of the Barberini. Innocent the Xth, now reigning, hath a great regard for him, though his kindred care not for him, because he speaketh his mind freely of them to the Pope' (p. 36).[26]

It only remains that I notice our Crashaw's friendship with (a) Abraham Cowley; (b) the Countess of Denbigh.

(a)Abraham Cowley.Of the alternate-poem on Hope, composed by Cowley and Crashaw (vol. i. pp. 175-181), and that 'Vpon two greene Apricockes sent to Cowley by Sir Crashaw' (ib. pp. 269-70), more in our next division. These remain as the ever-enduring 'memorial' of their friendship, while the thought-full, love-full 'Elegy,' devoted by the survivor to the memory of his Friend, can never pale of its glory (vol. i. pp. xxxvi.-viii.). All honour to Cowley that he kept the traduced 'Apostate' and 'Revolter' in his heart-of-hearts, and 'sought' him out in his lowly 'lodgings' in the gay, and yet (to him) sad Paris. It is my purpose one day worthily to reproduce the Works of this in form fantastic, but in substance most intellectual, of our Poets; and I shall have then, perhaps, something additional to communicate on this beautiful Friendship. They had appeared together as Poets in the 'Voces Votivæ.' The various readings show that Cowley's portion of Hope was revised in Paris; and this, with the gift of the 'apricockes,' expresses that they had some pleasant intercourse.[27]

(b)Countess of Denbigh.By the confiding goodness of the present Earl and Countess of Denbigh, I have, among my 'Sunny Memories,' most pleasant hours of a long summer day spent in examining the Library and familymss.and portraits at Newnham Paddox, and a continued and sympathetic correspondence, supplemented with kindred helpfulness on the part of the good Father-priest of the house. It is one of the anomalies of our national historic Biography that the sister of Buckingham—Susan, daughter of Sir George Villiers, of Brokesby, firstCountess of Denbigh—should have died and made no 'sign,' and left no memorial; for it is absolutely unknown when or where she did die. But as it is known thatshebecame a Roman Catholic,[28]while it is not known that Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of Edward Bourchier, Earl of Bath, who became third wife (of four) of Basil, second Earl of Denbigh, so 'changed,' we must conclude that Turnbull and others are mistaken in regarding the latter as Crashaw's 'patron' and friend. The family-papers show that Susan Countess of Denbigh was a lady of intellect and force; equally do they show that Elizabeth Bourchier was (to say the least) un-literary. I have from Newnham Paddox a sheaf of rarely-vivid and valuable Letters of 'Susan'—with some of 'Elizabeth;' and if I can only succeed in discovering the date of the former's death, so as to determine whether she was living up to Crashaw's death in 1650, or thereby—as dowager-countess—I intend to prepare a short Monograph on her, wherein I shall print, for the first time, such a series of Letters as will compare with any ever given to the world; and I should greatly like to engrave her never-yet engraved magnificent face at Newnham Paddox. For the present, a digression may be allowed, in order to introduce, as examples of these recovered Letters, a short and creditable one from Buckingham to his mother, and one from Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to her son; others, that are long and fact-full, hereafter (assupra). These in order:

I. Buckingham to his Mother [undated]:

Dere Mother,—Give me but as many blessings and pardons as I shall make falts, and then you make happie

Your most obedient Sonne,

For my Mother.

Buckingham.

II. Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to Lord Fielding:

My deere Sone,—The king dothe approve well of your going into Spane, and for my part I thinke it will be the best of your traviles by reson that the king doth discours moust of that plase. I am much afflicted for feare of Mr. Mason, but I hope our Lord well send him well home againe. I pray do not torment me with your going into the danger of the plauge any more. So with my blessing I take my leave.

Your loveing Mother,

For my deare Sonne theise.

Su. Denbigh.

The Verse-Letters to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. pp. 295-303) will be read with renewed interest in the light of the all-but certain fact that it was Susan, sister of Buckingham—every way a memorable woman—who was 'persuaded' by Crashaw to 'join' Roman Catholicism, as did her mother.[29]Reverting to the names which I have endeavoured to commemorate, where hitherto scarcely anything has been known, it will be perceived that the circle of Crashaw's friendships was a narrow one, and touched mainly the two things—his University career, and his great 'change' religiously or rather ecclesiastically. Of the Poets of his period, except Cowley and Ford, no trace remains as known to or influential over him. When Crashawentered Cambridge, Giles Fletcher had been dead ten years; Phineas Fletcher and Herrick had left about the same number of years; Herbert, for four or five; and Milton was just going. His most choice friends were among the mighty dead. Supreme names later lay outside of his access. I wish he had met—as he might have done—Milton. I pass next to

III.His characteristics and place as a Poet.It is something 'new under the sun' that it should be our privilege well-nigh to double the quantity of the extant Poetry of such a Singer as Richard Crashaw, by printing, for the first time, the treasure-trove of the Sancroft-Tannermss.; and by translating (also for the first time) the whole of his Latin poetry. Every element of a true poetic faculty that belongs to his own published Poems is found in the new, while there are new traits alike of character and genius; and our Translations must be as the 'raising' of the lid of a gem-filled casket, shut to the many for these (fully) two hundred years. The admirer of Crashaw hitherto has thus his horizon widened, and I have a kind of feeling that perchance it were wiser to leave the completed Poetry to make its own impression on those who come to it. Nevertheless I must, however briefly, fulfil my promise of an estimate of our Worthy. Four things appear to me to call for examination, in order to give the essentials of Crashaw as a Poet, and to gather his main characteristics: (a) Imaginative-sensuousness; (b) Subtlety of emotion; (c) Epigrams; (d) Translations and (briefly) Latin and Greek Poetry. I would say a little on each.

(a)Imaginative-sensuousness.Like 'charity' for 'love,' the word 'sensuous' has deteriorated in our day. It is, I fear, more than in sound and root confused with 'sensual,' in its base application. I use it as Milton did, in the well-known passage when he defined Poetry to be 'simple,sensuous, and passionate;' and I qualify 'sensuousness'with 'imaginative,' that I may express our Poet's peculiar gift of looking at everything with a full, open, penetrative eye, yet through his imagination; his imagination not being as spectacles (coloured) astride the nose, but as a light of white glory all over his intellect and entire faculties. Only Wordsworth and Shelley, and recently Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, are comparable with him in this. You can scarcely err in opening on any page in your out-look for it. The very first poem, 'The Weeper,' is lustrous with it. For example, what a grand reach of 'imaginative' comprehensiveness have we so early as in the second stanza, where from the swimming eyes of his 'Magdalene' he was, as it were, swept upward to the broad transfigured sky in its wild ever-varying beauty of the glittering silver rain!

'Heauns thy fair eyes be;Heauens of ever-falling starres.'Tis seed-time still with thee;And starres thou sow'st whose haruest daresPromise the Earth to counter-shineWhateuer makes heaun's forehead fine.'

How grandly vague is that 'counter-shinewhatever,' as it leads upwards to the 'forehead'—superb, awful, God-crowned—of the 'heauns'! Of the same in kind, but unutterably sweet and dainty also in its exquisiteness, is stanza vii.:

'The deaw no more will weepdewThe primrose's pale cheek to deck:The deaw no more will sleepNuzzel'd in the lily's neck;Much rather would it be thy tear,And leaue them both to tremble there.'

Wordsworth's vision of the 'flashing daffodils' is not finer than this. A merely realistic Poet (as John Clare or Bloomfield) would never have used the glorious singular,'thy tear,' with its marvellous suggestiveness of the multitudinous dew regarding itself as outweighed in everything by one 'tear' of such eyes. Every stanza gives a text for commentary; and the rapid, crowding questions and replies of the Tears culminate in the splendid homage to the Saviour in the conclusion, touched with a gentle scorn:

'We goe not to seekThe darlings of Aurora's bed,The rose's modest cheek,Nor the violet's humble head,Though the feild's eyes too Weepers be,Because they want such teares as we.Much lesse mean to traceThe fortune of inferior gemmes,Preferr'd to some proud face,Or pertch't vpon fear'd diadems:Crown'd heads are toyes. We goe to meetA worthy object, ourLord's feet.'

'Feet' at highest; mark the humbleness, and the fitness too. Even more truly than of Donne (in Arthur Wilson's Elegy) may it be said of Crashaw, here and elsewhere, thou 'Couldst give both life and sense unto a flower,'—faint prelude of Wordsworth's 'meanest flower.'

Dr. Macdonald (in 'Antiphon') is perplexingly unsympathetic, or, if I may dare to say it, wooden, in his criticism on 'The Weeper;' for while he characterises it generally as 'radiant of delicate fancy,' he goes on: 'but surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness, like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon' (p. 239). Fundamentally blundering is all this:for the Critic ought to have marked how the Poet's 'shoes' are put off his feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene; but thatsheis approached as far-back in the Past or in a Present wherein her tears have been 'wiped away,' so that the poem is dedicate not so much to The Weeper as to her Tears, as things of beauty and pricelessness. Mary, 'blessed among women,' is remembered all through; and just as with her Divine Son we must 'sorrow' in the vision of His sorrows, we yet have the remembrance that they are all done, 'finished;' and thus we can expatiate on them not with grief so much as joy. The prolongation of 'The Weeper' is no 'moth-like flitting about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman,' but the never-to-be-satisfied rapture over the evidence of a 'godly sorrow' that has worked to repentance, and in its reward given loveliness and consecration to the tears shed. The moon 'shining on icicles' is the antithesis of the truth. Thus is it throughout, as in the backgrounds of the great Portrait-painters as distinguished from Land-scapists and Sea-scapists and Sky-scapists—Crashaw inevitably works out his thoughts through something he has looked at as transfigured by his imagination, so that you find his most mystical thinking and feeling framed (so to say) with images drawn from Nature. That he did look not at but into Nature, let 'On a foule Morning, being then to take a Journey,' and 'To the Morning; Satisfaction for Sleepe,' bear witness. In these there are penetrative 'looks' that Wordsworth never has surpassed, and a richness almost Shakesperean. Milton must have studied them keenly. There is this characteristic also in the 'sensuousness' of Crashaw, that while the Painter glorifies the ignoble and the coarse (as Hobbima's Asses and red-cloaked Old Women) in introducing it into a scene of Wood, or Way-side, or Sea-shore, his outward images and symbolism are worthy in themselves, and stainless as worthy (passingexceptions only establishing the rule). His epithets are never superfluous, and are, even to surprising nicety, true. Thus he calls Egypt 'whiteEgypt' (vol. i. p. 81); and occurring as this does 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God,' we are reminded again how the youthful Milton must have had this extraordinary composition in his recollection when he composed his immortal Ode.[30]Similarly we have 'hir'dmist' (vol. i. p. 84); 'pretiouslosse' (ib.); 'fair-ey'dfallacy of Day' (ib. p. 85); 'blackbut faithfull perspectiue of Thee' (ib. p. 86); 'abasèdliddes' (ib. p. 88); 'gratiousrobbery' (ib. p. 156); 'thirsts ofloue' (ib.); 'timerouslight of starres' (ib. p. 172); 'rebelliouseye of Sorrow' (ib. p. 112); and so in hundreds of parallels. Take this from 'To the Name above every Name' (ib. p. 60):

'O come away ...O, see the weary liddes of wakefull Hope—Love's eastern windowes—all wide opeWith curtains drawn,To catch the day-break of Thy dawn.O, dawn at last, long-lookt-for Day,Take thine own wings, and come away.'

Comparing Cowley's and Crashaw's 'Hope,' Coleridge thus pronounces on them: 'Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of what we now term sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident;' and he continues, 'In that on the Name of Jesus, equally so; but his lines on St. Teresa are the finest.' 'Where he does combine richness of thought and diction, nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire,

Since 'tis not to be had at home. . . . . . .She'l to the Moores and martyrdom.'[31]

And then as never-to-be-forgotten 'glory' of the Hymn to Teresa, he adds: 'these verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of the Christabel; if indeed, by some subtle process of the mind, they did notsuggest the first thought of the whole poem' (Letters and Conversations, 1836, i. 196). Coleridge makes another critical remark which it may be worth while to adduce and perhaps qualify. 'Poetry as regards small Poets may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations. Thus [even] Crashaw uses an image "as sugar melts in tea away;" which althoughproper thenandtrue now, was in bad taste at that time equally with the present. In Shakespeare, in Chaucer, there was nothing of this' (as before). The great Critic forgot that 'sugar' and 'tea' were not vulgarised by familiarity when Crashaw wrote, that the wonder and romance of their gift from the East still lay around them, and that their use was select, not common. Thus later I explain Milton's homeliness of allusion, as in the word 'breakfast,' and 'fell to,' and the like; words and places and things that have long been not prosaic simply, but demeaned and for ever unpoetised. I am not at all careful to defend the 'sugar' and 'tea' metaphor; but it, I think, belongs also to his imaginative-sensuousness, whereby orient awfulness almost, magnified and dignified it to him.

Moreover the canon in 'Antiphon' is sound: 'When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed master-dom, upon any passage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of sight—the thing to be seen, and the eye to see it. No doubt the expression may be inadequate; but if we can compensate the deficiency by adding more vision, so much the better for us' (p. 243).

I thank Dr. George Macdonald[32](in 'Antiphon') forhis quaint opening words on our Crashaw, and forgive him, for their sake, his blind reading of 'The Weeper.' 'I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw. Indeed, he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are ever floating in the upper air of it' (p. 238). True, and yet not wholly; or rather, if our Poet ascends to 'the upper air,' and sings there with all the divineness of the skylark, like the skylark his eyes fail not to over-watch the nest among the grain beneath, nor his wings to be folded over it at the shut of eve. Infinitely more, then, is to be found in Crashaw than Pope (in his Letter to his friend Henry Cromwell) found: 'I take this poet to have writ like a gentleman; that is, at leisure hours, and more to keep out of idleness than to establish a reputation: so that nothing regular or just can be expected of him. All that regards design, form, fable (which is the soul of poetry), all that concerns exactness, or consent of parts (which is the body), will probably be wanting; only pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse (which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry), may be found in these verses.' Nay verily, the form is often exquisite; but 'neat' and 'pretty conceptions' applied to such verse is as 'pretty' applied to Niagara—so full, strong, deep, thought-laden is it. I have no wish to charge plagiarism on Pope from Crashaw, as Peregrine Phillips did (see onward); but neither is the contemptuous as ignorant answer by a metaphor of Hayley to be received. The two minds were essentially different: Pope was talented, and used his talents to the utmost; Crashaw had absolute as unique genius.[33]

(b)Subtlety of emotion.Dr. Donne, in a memorable passage, with daring originality, sings of Mrs. Drury rapturously:

'Her pure and eloquent soulSpoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,That one might almost say her body thought.'

I have much the same conception of Crashaw's thinking. It was so emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling. Bare intellect, 'pure' (= naked) thought, you rarely come on in his Poems. The thought issues forth from (in old-fashioned phrase) the heart, and its subtlety is something unearthly even to awfulness. Let the reader give hours to the study of the composition entitled 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God, a Hymn svng as by the three Kings,' and 'In the holy Nativity of ovr Lord God.' Their depth combined with elevation, their grandeur softening into loveliness, their power with pathos, their awe bursting into rapture, their graciousness and lyrical music, their variety and yet unity, will grow in their study. As always, there is a solid substratum of original thought in them; and the thinking, as so often in Crashaw, is surcharged with emotion. If the thought may belikened to fire, the praise, the rapture, the yearning may be likened to flame leaping up from it. Granted that, as in fire and flame, there are coruscations and jets of smoke, yet is the smoke that 'smoak' of which Chudleigh in his Elegy for Donne sings:

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