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And then, since he has deliberately severed himself from the world of life and action, he is reduced by introspection to childish and impotent longings that his nature were of a more perfect, even if of a lower, order :

O that I were an orange-tree,
That busy plant!

Then should I ever laden be,
And never want

Some fruit for Him that dressèd me!

As the epigram was the mould which Herbert naturally chose for the expression of his varying spiritual moods, so (and in this too he followed the footsteps of Donne) the elaboration of metaphor was the main device by which he sought to give point to his spiritual epigrams. Success attended him in proportion as the thought which he strove to express was simple and natural. His imagery is often beautiful: nothing, for example, can surpass in exquisite propriety the simile by which he likens the shrinking of religious feelings in his soul to the hibernation of flowers :

Who would have thought my shrivell❜d heart
Could have recover'd greenness? It was gone.
Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother root, when they have blown,
Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

On the other hand, his habit of expressing the abstract by the concrete led him into temptations to which he constantly yielded. He cultivated quaintness for its own sake. Sometimes he makes a whole sonnet consist of nothing but metaphors, as, for example, when he strives to depict the manifold spiritual aspects of prayer :—

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of time which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well-drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise ;

Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

This conscious artificiality impaired the fineness of his judgment and taste. He did not perceive when an image, naturally beautiful, was spoiled by over-elaboration, so that he constantly wrote stanzas like the following:

Listen, sweet Dove, unto my song,

And spread Thy golden wings in me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,

Till it get wing, and fly away with Thee.

Nor did he understand how great would be the feeling of artistic disappointment in the reader to find a poem on Virtue opening with the perfect stanza :

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky,

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die;

and concluding with this:

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like seasoned timber, never gives,

And though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

I fear it is only too evident that Herbert was content to write "coal," where he meant "ash," because the latter word would not rhyme with "soul." Nor did he care whether his images were ugly and clumsy in themselves, so long as they sufficiently allegorised his meaning. When he wishes to describe the condition of the soul incapable of rising into acts of "Praise," he writes:

But when Thou dost on business blow,

It hangs, it clogs ;

Not all the teams in Albion, in a row,

Can hale or draw it out of door;

Legs are but stumps and Pharaoh's wheels but logs,
And struggling hinders more.

He often offends by the materialism and familiarity of the images under which he describes the most sacred acts of religion. Thus he represents the Holy Communion as

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From the character of these lines it will readily be divined that there was something in the religious instincts of many Englishmen which would hardly find its full satisfaction within the Anglican channels marked out for it by George Herbert. For himself, his metaphysical intellect and his power of abstract thought found sufficient scope in the sober doctrine and ritual of that Communion, as it was being developed under the influence of Laud's principle of the Beauty of Holiness. But men of a purely

emotional temperament were carried irresistibly by their æsthetic needs towards the more splendid ceremonial of the Church of Rome. We have already had an illustration, in the poetry of Southwell, of the effects produced on metrical composition by religious mysticism; and this movement of the imagination reached a fuller development in the genius of one of the most remarkable poets of the reign of Charles I.

Richard Crashaw was the son of William Crashaw, B.D., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and afterwards (by his own description) " Preacher of God's Word " at Bridlington, Beverley, the Temple, Agnus Burton, and finally Whitechapel. The father was a man imbued with the strong anti-Papal feelings roused in English society by the Gunpowder Plot, and with that antipathy to the Jesuits which is expressed in the Locusta of Phineas Fletcher. He was especially hostile to the Mariolatry of the Jesuit order, and exposed it in a pamphlet called The Disloyalty of Loyola, citing some of the doctrines they advocated as "That the milk of Mary may come into comparison with the blood of Christ"; "That the Christian man's faith may lawfully take hold of both as well as one"; "That the best compound for a sick soul is to mix together her milk and Christ's blood"; "That Christ is still a little child in His mother's arms, and so may be prayed unto"; and "That a man shall oftentimes be sooner heard at God's hand in the mediation of Mary than Jesus Christ." Being, however, a man of vivid imagination, he was powerfully attracted by the principles he detested, as he showed by translating many of the Latin hymns of the Jesuits into English. He also translated a hymn ascribed to St. Bernard, entitled Querela sive Dialogus Anima et Corporis Damnati, the opening of which, in his rendering, has a certain weird power :—

In silence of a winter's night,
A sleeping, yet a walking, sprite,
A liveless body, to my sight
Methought appeared, thus addight.

In that my sleep I did descry

A soul departed hence lately
From that foul body which lay by,

Wailing with sighs, and loud did cry.

It is interesting to observe the effects of this mingled attraction and repulsion on the life and poetry of Richard, his son, who was born in London in 1612-13. From Charterhouse, where he was at school, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, matriculating there as pensioner 26th March 1632. At that time the Anglican revival under Laud was at its height, and much attention was being paid by the different colleges to the beautification of their chapels: Pembroke was forward in the movement, as was Peterhouse, to which college Crashaw removed in 1636, after taking his B.A. degree, to be elected Fellow there in 1637. He had doubtless been familiarised by his father from his childhood with the problems of theological metaphysics, and he now surrendered himself with fervour to the religious enthusiasm of the age. "In the Temple of God"-says the preface to the edition of his poems published soon after his death,-" under His wing, he led his life in St. Mary's Church: there he lodged under Tertullian's roof of angels; there he made his nest, more gladly than David's swallow, near the House of God, where, like the primitive saints, he offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day."

These devotional exercises were rudely interfered with in 1643, when the Parliamentary Visitors began their work of iconoclasm at Cambridge. Peterhouse was exposed to the first fury of their brutal barbarism. "We went "so they exultingly record-" to Peterhouse, 1643, December 21, with officers and soldiers, and . . . we pulled down two mighty great angels with wings, and divers other angels, and the Four Evangelists, and Peter with his keys over the chapel door, and about an hundred cherubims and angels, and divers superstitious letters in gold." The shock to a man of Crashaw's emotional temperament must have been great, nor did the violence of the Puritans

1 Grosart's edition of Crashaw's complete Works, vol. ii. p. xlviii.

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