And of the longer poems, In the Glorious Epiphany of our Lord God-a composition which has more of central idea and organic unity than is usual in Crashaw—the prophecy by the Magi, who are represented as sunworshippers, of the approaching eclipse of their deity by the Sun of Righteousness, is most musically elaborated in an antiphon full of skilfully combined verbal harmonies.

These are remarkable achievements. But when we look away from such metrical tours de force to what Pope calls the soul of poetry, it cannot be denied that the judgment of the latter on Crashaw is fundamentally just. In all that relates to “design, form, fable,” the latter shows a strange deficiency of creative power. The student of his poetry will at once observe how little of it was inspired by original ideas. Of his most famous compositions, the Sospetto d' Erode is a paraphrase of a single book of Marino's Strage degli Innocenti. Music's Duel is a lengthy expansion of Strada's short Latin poem on the Musician and the Nightingale. The Hymn in honour of St. Teresa and The Flaming Heart are metrical exercises suggested by incidents recorded in newly published Lives of the saint. In these, and indeed in most of Crashaw's poems, the inspiring motive comes from the thought of others, rather than from his own.

And the cause of this phenomenon is not difficult to understand. Poetry was not to Crashaw what it was to George Herbert, a vehicle of metaphysical thought, enabling him to mount by an intellectual process into the presence of God, and therefore under the control of judgment and reason: it was a musical instrument which gave forth its notes, like an Æolian harp, at the breath of each mystical emotion. His artistic temperament combined much of the genius of the musician and the painter, and his imagination was swayed more through his senses than through his intellect. Hence his methods of composition were those proper to painting and music, rather than to poetry. What he admired in the work of other poets was richness of descriptive detail, and nothing is more noticeable in his own than the number of images it

contains, raising associations of sight, sound, and even taste and smell. For example, he was evidently attracted to Marino's Strage degli Innocenti, for the sake, not of the action, in which that poem is very deficient, but of the vividness of the descriptions. Marino, like all poets of the second class, seeks to produce a feeling of the sublime by piling up images, and Crashaw endeavours to surpass his master. In the following description of Satan in hell the words printed in italics are additions to the conception of the Italian poet :

His eyes, the sullen dens of Death and Night,
Startle the dull air with a dismal red:
Such his fell glances as the fatal light
Of staring comets that look kingdoms dead.
From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite
Of hell's own stink a worser stink is spread:

His breath hell's lightning is: and each deep groan
Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone.

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation

Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath,

Whose unconsumed consumption preys upon
The never-dying life of a long death.

In this sad house of slow destruction

(His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath

A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash,

While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash.

In the minds of those who have familiarised themselves with great poetry, this materialistic imagerywhether in Marino or Crashaw-produces not horror but disgust, and the justice of Pope's criticism can be verified by any one who chooses to compare with the above description the consummate art with which Milton in Paradise Lost contrives by means of simile and comparison to suggest, rather than to describe, the colossal stature of Satan. It is needless to say that such an organic distribution of imagery is beyond the reach of poets like Marino and Crashaw.

Probably the poem of Crashaw's which Pope had particularly in his mind was The Weeper, of which it may be safely said, that no metrical composition in the English

language of the same length contains so much imagery and so little thought. It consists of thirty-three stanzas, each of six lines. Its professed subject is the tears of the Magdalene, the poet's intention being to exhibit this subject in a different light in each stanza. His one underlying idea is that the tears of St. Mary Magdalene recorded in Scripture have never ceased to flow, and he ransacks heaven and earth to illustrate this idea by a string of hyperboles. The reader may estimate the amount of consecutive thought in the poem by two stanzas, which follow each other, and the first of which has more substance in it than almost any of its companions:

Not, "So long she lived,"
Shall thy tomb report of thee;
But, "So long she grievèd":
Thus must we date thy memory.

Others by moments, months, and years,

Measure their ages; thou, by tears.

So do perfumes expire,

So sigh tormented sweets, opprest

With proud unpitying fire.

Such tears the suffering rose, that's vext
With ungentle flames, does shed,

Sweating in a too warm bed.

Intoxicated by his flow of words and images, Crashaw lost all sense of proportion, even in the organisation of his metrical harmonies. Probably no poet has ever imitated the physical effect of a nightingale's song so skilfully as (setting aside sense) he has done in the following lines from Music's Duel :

Her supple breast thrills out
Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetness, hovers o'er her skill,
And folds in wav'd notes, with a trembling bill,

The pliant series of her slippery song ;

Then starts she suddenly into a throng

Of short, thick sobs, whose thundering volleys float,
And roll themselves over her lubric throat

In panting murmurs, still'd out of her breast,
That ever-bubbling spring, the sug❜red nest
Of her delicious soul, that there does lie,
Bathing in streams of liquid melody-

Had he stopped here the musical period would have been perfect. Unfortunately, an image suggested itself to his fancy, and he was unable to resist the temptation of pursuing it. He therefore proceeds :

-

Music's best seed-plot, whence in ripen'd airs

A golden-headed harvest fairly rears

His honey-dropping tops, ploughed by her breath,
Which then reciprocally laboureth

In that sweet soil, etc.

With such a fatal want of self-judgment, it can readily be understood that, when Crashaw had thought of a novel image, he never cared to consider whether or not it was appropriate. Comparing the tears of the Magdalene to the Milky Way, he writes in The Weeper :

Upwards thou dost weep:

Heaven's bosom drinks the gentle stream:
Where the milky rivers creep,

Thine floats above and is the cream!

Proceeding with his idea of the stellification of the tears, he says:

When some bright new guest
Takes up among the stars a room,
And heaven will make a feast;
Angels with their bottles come

And draw from these full eyes of thine,
Their Master's water, their own wine!

In any one but Crashaw we might suspect an intention of humour in such imagery. But that the suspicion in his case would be entirely groundless is proved by the imagery of his "Answer" to Cowley's lines on Hope:

Thy golden growing head never hangs down

Till in the lap of Love's full noon

It falls and dies! O no, it melts away,
As doth the dawn into the day:

As lumps of sugar lose themselves, and twine
Their subtle essence with the soul of wine.

Here the simile seems to be borrowed from George
Herbert's Banquet. But Herbert, with all the familiarity

which he imparted to the metaphysical style, would scarcely have ventured, as Crashaw did-in verses which are certainly for the most part excellent—to compare the blood and water flowing from the Saviour's side with the casks of Massic and Falernian wine celebrated by Horace:—

Tamne ego sim tetricus? valeant jejunia: vinum
Est mihi dulce meo, nec pudet esse, cado.
Est mihi quod castis, neque prelum passa, racemis
Palmite virgineo protulit uva parens.

Hoc mihi, ter denis sat enim maturuit annis,
Tandem, ecce, o dolio præbibit hasta suo.
Jamque it; et o quanto calet actus aromate torrens,
Acer ut hinc aura divite currit odor!

Quæ rosa per cyathos volitat tam vina Falernos?
Massica quæ tanto sidere vina tremunt?

O ego nescibam; atque ecce est vinum illud amoris,
Unde ego sim tantis, unde ego par cyathis.
Vincor: et o istis totus prope misceor auris :
Non ego sum tantis, non ego par cyathis.
Sed quid ego invicti metuo bona robora vini?
Ecce est quæ validum diluit unda merum.1

Summed up in a sentence, the poems of Crashaw exhibit on the one hand the fruits of a religious mysticism resulting from monastic seclusion, on the other the materialism arising out of the union between the ceremonial of the Jesuits and the traditions of pagan literature.

Of Henry Vaughan, author of Silex Scintillans, hardly any external facts are recorded. The son of Thomas Vaughan of Tretower Castle, he and his twin-brother Thomas were born at Newton by Usk, Brecknockshire, 17th April 1622. He was educated in his early boyhood by Matthew Herbert, Rector of Llangattock, to whom (in imitation of Ben Jonson's verses to Camden) he pays a tribute of affectionate reference in his "Address to Posterity" at the close of Olor Iscanus. In 1638 he was entered with his twin-brother at Jesus College, Oxford. There is no record of his having taken a degree, but he was a member of the college in 1641, and wrote in that year a congratulatory poem in English to the King on his return from Scotland. Epigrammata Sacra, clxx.

1