tions at Little Gidding he would emulate | porated a member of the sister university, the vigils of his teacher by nightly watches in the church of Little St. Mary's, which was close to his new college of Peterhouse. If the civil war had never broken out, it is probable that Crashaw would never have left the Anglican communion. Nicholas Ferrar, who had sympathies for the ritual and even for the dogmas of Rome, which had been unheard of a generation earlier, stayed his foot very firmly out side the Papal precincts. He died deliberately satisfied with the English forms of faith. He had never taken orders, and, what is still more strange, it seems that Crashaw never did; but he took the warmest interest in ecclesiastical affairs, and was one of those who clamored importunately for the restoration of the college chapel of Peterhouse, which was performed during his fellowship. And when no longer he was forced at midnight to cross the college bounds and enter the neighboring chancel of Little St. Mary's, there can be no doubt that he spent more hours than ever in prayer under the shadow of the wings of the great gold angels of Peterhouse chapel, and among the hundred saints and cherubs, with "God the Father in a chair, holding a glass in His hand," which formed part of the ancient ornament of this splendid building. There, in a trance of orison, with the rich notes of the organ pouring upon him and the light from the antique windows surrounding him, the Puritan Commission found him unaware. On December 21, 1643, Mr. Horscot and his soldiers sacked the chapel of Peterhouse, pulling down the images and breaking the windows. This was but a local realization of the universal fact that the reign of Laudian ceremonial was over. Laud himself was executed three weeks later, and the very foundations of episcopacy in England were shaken. Cambridge formed a helpless island in a sea of Puritan counties, and in the summer of 1644 the Earl of Manchester, on his way to the siege of York, lingered in the eastern university long enough to hold out the alternative of the Covenant or of ejection to every mas ter and fellow. On June 11 five fellows of Peterhouse, Crashaw of course being one of them, were forcibly driven out, and five Puritans appointed in their place. It seems probable that Crashaw proceeded at once to Oxford, where the king was still for a few months undisturbed. It is at least natural that he should have done so, since in 1641 he had been incor and had been that year in residence at Oxford. It may even be conjectured that the events which followed the execution at Strafford so terrified the timid scholar that he removed to the western and more loyal university, and was ejected from Peterhouse during his absence. However this may be, his position must have become desperate soon after 1644, and he may even have been concealed at Newnham Paddox by his friends the Earl and Countess of Denbigh until the defeat at Naseby finally overwhelmed the Royalist party in ruin. It was at this time that the poet seems to have entered the Catholic Church. His religious nature possessed what Milton calls "a fugitive and cloistered virtue;" to him it must have seemed that the English ritual was destroyed, its bishops scattered, its creed disused, its authority ridiculed; and from the face of anarchy this shrinking soul fled to the staunch and conservative arms of Rome. He had long been meditating the possibility of this step, although very probably it was forced upon him at last harshly and suddenly. Cowley, who was always a sincere Anglican, refers to his friend's conversion to Rome with a charming tact and delicacy: Pardon, my mother Church, if I consent Ah! that our greatest faults were in belief! Regarding the sanctity and singleheartedness of the unfortunate Crashaw there is but one testimony. The only dissentient voice is that of the harsh and ribald Prynne, whose accusation is a eulogy. And now, having attempted to conduct the sacred poet to the great crisis of his life, let us leave him there for a while, and consider those poems which his first editor tells us were written ́beneath the wings of God, when Crashaw lodged under Tertullian's roof of angels at Peterhouse, “where he made his nest more gladly than David's swallow near the house of God, and, like a primitive. saint, offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day." Crashaw's English poems were first published in 1646, soon after his arrival in Paris. He was at that time in his thirty-fourth year, and the volume contains his best and most mature as well as his crudest pieces. It is indeed a collec And turn Love's soldiers, upon thee Nor in the poem from which these lines are quoted does this melodious rapture flag during nearly two hundred verses. But such.a sustained flight is rare, as in the similar poem of "The Flaniing Heart," also addressed to St. Teresa, where, after a long prelude of frigid and tuneless conceits, it is only at the very close that the poet suddenly strikes upon this golden chord of ecstasy: Let all thy scattered shafts of light, that play By all thy dower of lights and fires, tion of juvenile and manly verses thrown together with scarcely a hint of arrangement, the uncriticised labor of fifteen years. The title is "Steps to the Temple, Sacred Poems, with other Delights of the Muses." The sacred poems are so styled by his anonymous editor because they are "steps for happy souls to climb heaven by; "the "Delights of the Muses" are entirely secular, and the two divisions of the book, therefore, reverse the order of Herrick's similarly edited "Hesperides and "Noble Numbers." The "Steps to the Temple are distinguished at once from the collection with which it is most natural to compare them, "The Temple of Herbert, by the fact that they are,not poems of experience, but of ecstasy, not of meditation, but of devotion. Herbert, and with him most of the sacred poets of the age, are autobiographical; they analyze their emotions, they take themselves to task, they record their struggles, their defeats, their consolation. But if the azure cherubim of introspection are the dominant muses of English sacred verse, the flame colored seraph of worship reigns in that of Crashaw. He has made himself familiar with all the amorous phraseology of the Catholic metaphysicians; he has read the passionate canticles of St. John of the Cross, the books of the Carmelite nun, St. Teresa, and all the other rosy and fiery contributions to ecclesiastical literature laid by Spain at the feet of the pope during the closing decades of the sixteenth century. The virginal courage and ardor of St. Teresa inspire Crashaw with his loveliest and most faultless verses. We need not share nor even sym-chology which England possessed until pathize with the sentiment of such lines as these to acknowledge that they belong to the highest order of lyrical writing: Thou art Love's victim, and must die His is the dart must make thy death, Fit executioners for thee, By thy large draughts of intellectual day By all the heaven thou hast in Him, If Crashaw had left us nothing more than these two fragments, we should be able to distinguish him by them among English poets. He is the solitary representative of the poetry of Catholic psy our own days; and Germany has one no less unique in Friedrich Spe. I do not know that any critic has compared Spe and Crashaw, but they throw lights upon the genius of one another which may seasonably detain us for a while. The great Catholic poet of Germany during the sev enteenth century was born in 1591. Like Crashaw, he was set in motion by the Spanish mystics; like him he stood on the verge of a great poetical revolution without being in the least affected by it. To Waller and to Opitz, with their new dry systems of precise prosody, Crashaw and Spe owed nothing; they were purely romantic and emotional in style. Spe was born a Catholic, spent all his life among the Jesuits, and died, worn out with good works and immortalized by an heroic struggle against the system of persecution for witchcraft, in the hospital of Trèves, in 1635, just when Crashaw was or " Massacre of the Innocents," a famous poem by the Neapolitan Cavaliere Marini, who had died in 1625. Crashaw has thrown a great deal of dignity and fancy. into this version, which, however, outdoes the original in ingenious illustration, as the true Marinists, such as Achillini, outdid Marini in their conceited sonnets. Crashaw, in fact, is a genuine Marinist, the happiest specimen which we possess in English, for he preserves a high level of fantastic foppery, and seldom, at his worst, sinks to those crude animal imaginings illustrations from food, for instance which occasionally make such writers as Habington and Carew not merely ridiculous but repulsive. becoming enthralled by the delicious mysteries of Little Gidding. Both of them wrote Jesuit eclogues. In Spe the shepherd winds his five best roses into a garland for the infant Jesus; in Crashaw he entertains the " starry stranger " with conceits about his diamond eyes and the red leaves of his lips. In each poet there is an hysterical delight in blood and in the details of martyrdom, in each a shrill and frantic falsetto that jars on the modern ear, in each a sweetness of diction and purity of fancy that redeem a hundred faults. The poems of Spe, entitled | Trutz-Nachtigal," were first printed in 1649, the year that Crashaw died. The chief distinction between Spe and Crashaw is, in the first place, that Crashaw is In criticising with severity the piece on by far the greater and more varied of the Mary Magdalene which stands in the two as regards poetical gifts, and, sec-forefront of Crashaw's poems, and bears ondly, that while Spe was inspired by the the title of "The Weeper," I have the national Volkslied, and introduced its ef- misfortune to find myself at variance with fects into his song, Crashaw was an adept most of his admirers. I cannot, howevin every refinement of metrical structure er, avoid the conviction that the obtrusion which had been invented by the poet art- of this eccentric piece on the threshold of ists of England, Spain, and Italy. The his shrine has driven away from it many progress of our poetical literature in the a would-be-worshipper. If language be seventeenth century will never be thor-ever liable to abuse in the hands of a oughly explained until some competent clever poet, it is surely outraged here. scholar shall examine the influence of Spanish poetry upon our own. This influence seems to be particularly strong in the case of Donne, and in the next generation in that of Crashaw. I am not sufficiently familiar with Spanish poetry to give an opinion on this subject which is of much value; but as I write I have open before me the works of Gongora, and I find in the general disposition of his "Octavas Sacras" and in the style of his "Canciones" resemblances to the staves introduced to us by Crashaw which can scarcely be accidental. We know that the latter" was excellent in Italian and Spanish," and we are thus led on to consider the more obvious debt which he owed to the contemporary poetry of Italy. One of the largest pieces of work which he undertook was the translation of the first canto of the “Strage degli Innocenti," | Every extravagant and inappropriate Two walking baths, two weeping motions, These are the worst lines in Crashaw. They are perhaps the worst in all English poetry, but they must not be omitted here, since they indicate to us the principal danger to which not he only but most of his compeers were liable. It was from the tendency to call a pair of eyes "portable and compendious oceans that Waller and Dryden, after both of them stumbling on the same stone in their youth, finally delivered us. It is useless to linger with indulgence over the stanzas of a poem like "The Weeper," simply because many of the images are in themselves pretty. The system upon which these juvenile pieces of Crashaw are written is in itself indefensible, and is founded upon what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls "an incurable defect of style." from the Latin of Strada. As one fre quently sees a reference to the "Latin poet Strada," it may be worth while to remark that Famianus Strada was not a poet at all, but a lecturer in the Jesuit colleges. He belonged to Crashaw's own age, having been born in 1572, and dying in the year of the English poet's death, 1649. The piece on the rivalry of the musician and the nightingale was pub Crashaw, however, possesses style, or lished first at Cologne in 1617, in a volhe would not deserve the eminent place ume of "Prolusiones on rhetoric and he holds among our poets. The ode in poetry, and occurs in the sixth lecture of praise of Teresa, written while the author the second course on poetic style. The was still among the Protestants, and there- Jesuit rhetorician has been trying to fafore probably about 1642, has already been miliarize his pupils with the style of the cited here. It is an exquisite composi- great classic poets by reciting to them tion, full of real vision, music of the most passages in imitation of Ovid, Lucretius, delicate order, and imagery which, al- Lucan, and the rest, and at last he comes though very profuse and ornate, is always to Claudian. This, he says, is an imitasubordinated to the moral meaning and to tion of the style of Claudian, and so he the progress of the poem. The "Shep-gives us the lines which have become so herds' Hymn," too, is truly ingenious and famous. That a single fragment in a graceful, with its pretty pastoral tender- school-book should suddenly take root ness. "On Mr. G. Herbert's Book sent and blossom in European literature, when to a Gentlewoman" evidently belongs to all else that its voluminous author wrote the St. Teresa period, and contains the and said was promptly forgotten, is very same charm. The lyrical epistle persuad- curious, but not unprecedented. In Ening the Countess of Denbigh to join the gland the first person who adopted or Roman communion contains extraordi- adapted Strada's exercise was John Ford, nary felicities, and seems throbbing with in his play of "The Lover's Melancholy," tenderness and passion. We have al- in 1629. Dr. Grosart found another early ready drawn attention to the splendid version among the Lansdowne MSS., and close of "The Flaming Heart." There Ambrose Phillips a century later essayed is perhaps no other of the sacred poems in the volume of 1646 which can be commended in its entirety. Hardly one but contains felicities; the dullest is brightened by such flashes of genius as But the poems are hard, dull, and laborious, the exercises of a saint indeed, but untouched by inspiration, human or divine. We have to return to the incomparable “Hymn to St. Teresa" to remind ourselves of what heights this poet was capable. There can be very little doubt that Crashaw regarded the second section of his book, the secular "Delights of the Muses," as far inferior in value and importance to the "Steps to the Temple." That is not, however, a view in which the modern reader can coincide, and it is rather the ingenuity of his human poems than the passion of his divine which has given him a prominent place among poets. The "Delights" open with the celebrated piece called "Music's Duel," paraphrased it. There are numerous references to it Thou cheat'st us, Ford, mak'st one seem two by art; What is love's sacrifice but the broken heart? "sweet After "Music's Duel" the best-known poem of Crashaw's is his "Wishes to his Supposed Mistress," a piece in forty-two stanzas, which Mr. Palgrave reduced to twenty-one in his "Golden Treasury." He neglected to mention the theft," and accordingly most readers know the poem only as he reduced and rearranged it. The act was bold, perhaps, but I think that it was judicious. As Crashaw left it the poem extends beyond the limits of a lyric, tediously repeats its sentiments, and gains neither in force nor charm by its extreme length. In Mr. Palgrave's selection it challenges compar ison with the loveliest and most original pieces of the century. It never, I think, rises to the thrilling tenderness which Donne is capable of on similar occasions. Crashaw never pants out a line and a half which leaves us faint and throbbing, as if the heart of humanity itself had been revealed to us for a moment; with all his flying color and lambent flame Crashaw is not Donne. But the "Wishes" is more than a charming, it is a fascinating poem, the pure dream of the visionary poet, who liked to reflect that he too might marry if he would, and choose a godly bride. He calls upon her and finally Life, that dares send Of worth may leave her poor Of wishes; and I wish- -no more. The same refined and tender spirit animates the " Epitaph upon Husband and Wife, who died and were buried together." The lovely, rambling verses of "To the Morning, in Satisfaction for Sleep," are perhaps more in the early manner of Keats than any other English lines. In some of those sacred poems which we have lately been considering he reminds us no less vividly of Shelley, and there are not a few passages of Crashaw which it would require a very quick ear to distinguish from Mr. Swinburne. We may safely conjecture that the latter poet's was written in delibSong in Season erate rivalry of that song of Crashaw's which runs 66 The But perhaps the sweetest and most modern of all Crashaw's secular lyrics is that entitled "Love's Horoscope." phraseology of the black art was never used with so sweet and picturesque an ingenuity, and the piece contains some of the most delicately musical cadences to be found in the poetry of the age : Thou know'st a face in whose each look It is probable from internal and from external evidence also that all these secular poems belong to Crashaw's early years at Cambridge. The pretty lines "On two Green Apricocks sent to Cowley by Sir Crashaw" evidently date from 1633; the various elegies and poems of compliment can be traced to years ranging from 1631 to 1634. It is doubtful whether the "Wishes" themselves are at all later than this. Even regarding him as a finished poet ten years before the publication of |