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volume in purple velvet stamped with acorn, sprigs of oak, and fleurs-de-lis:

A hasty portion of prescribed sleep,

Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep.

[For] reverent discipline, and religious fear,
And soft obedience find sweet biding here,
Silence and sacred rest, peace and pure joys,

Kind loves keep house, lie close, make no noise.

The hands of Mary Collett may have helped to bind the little prayer book given to a young gentlewoman, "M. R.," and enhanced in its value by the ode which Crashaw prefixed:

A nest of new-born sweets;

Whose native fires disdaining

To lie thus folded, and complaining

Of these ignoble sheets,

Affect more comely bands,

Fair one, from thy kind hands,

And confidently look

To find the rest

Of a rich binding in your breast.1

It was not "the soothing tendency of the Prayer Book" that attracted Crashaw; he found in the end that its "native fires" were too little ebullient to satisfy a "flaming heart."

The "pious orgies" of Crashaw's muse belong to a world remote from the "decent prayers" of Herbert. He commends the poems of Herbert in a copy sent to another gentlewoman than M. R. (in the Dionysiac mysteries gentlewomen may toss the thyrsus) but his commendation would hardly have been to the taste of 1 See "Nicholas Ferrar, his Household and his Friends," edited by the Rev. T. T. Carter, pp. 235, 236.

the parish priest of Bemerton; the lady's eyes are to kindle Herbert's sacrifice; when her white hands open the volume she will hold an angel by the wings-an angel who would gladly

flutter in the balmy air

Of your well-perfumed prayer.

The country parson, who in a state of virginity would never have spoken to a woman alone, might have chosen rather to take flight than to flutter in the cell of Crashaw's "fairest."

Vaughan

Crashaw is as far removed from Vaughan. is the mystic (if we must use that inappropriate term) of light; Crashaw is the mystic of flame. It is not strange that Herbert should have innocently played with pious fancies, or should have fitted his metaphors to his ideas, tooth by tooth, and have given the pretty cog-wheel a twist. But we may wonder that the fire of Crashaw's ardour did not burn away the tinsel ornament of the school of Marino. It is to be feared that the language of mysticism may, when the mood cools, itself degenerate into a trick. Neither Vaughan nor Herbert equalled Crashaw in his greatest lines; all the eagle, all the dove were for a moment in his genius; his face might well have appeared in some Italian painting among those of the "bright youth of heaven," who in his own poem bear our Blessed Lady through the clouds on golden wings, and sing "under so sweet a burden"; he alone among poets of his time was capable of receiving the full "dower of lights and fires" from that Britomart of Spanish piety, Saint Teresa. But the live coal may

The irradiation in

fade, the altar-flame may sink, and still it may be possible to manipulate the conventional terms "love's delicious fires," "sweet pains," " intolerable joys," "amorous languishments," "luminous trances," "dear and divine annihilations." And so we may come to respect such modest pieties and edifying counsel as the country parson, even in the porch of the temple, commends to our hearts and conscience. Vaughan's best poems is too pure and pall upon the spirit of sense within us. The " amorous languishments" of Crashaw may for a time melt our will in a divine voluptuousness; and then it comes to our recollection that the great saints often found more spiritual gain in aridity than in sweetness. Saint Teresa's eulogist might well have remembered her strong good-sense, her power of wise organisation, her genuine feeling of humour.

various ever to

Crashaw's flame is full of changing colour; at its purest, the flame is varied with beautiful surprises; but if coloured lights fail him, the poet is well pleased with what Bacon calls the "oes and spangs" of tinsel. Calculated hyperboles, neat extravagances, the ineffable set forth by a fanciful identity of contradictories— flaming fountains, weeping fires, gold hair that is a wandering mine, eyes that are walking baths, and whatever else can unhinge the sanity of imagination, are after all poor temptations to draw a true poet into sin. To criticise Crashaw's poetry as Johnson criticised Cowley's, from the standpoint of common-sense, is legitimate and is useful; to criticise it as showing a defect not of judgment but of true passion is more important. There is

something to admire in almost every poem by Crashaw; and there is hardly a single poem that we can admire with a good conscience, for his lyrical ardour was too intermittent to enable him often to achieve a beautiful whole. True love should lead to quiet, or at least to confidence in its theme; Crashaw is always alert for dazzling legerdemain of pious fancy, and so little trusts his theme that he must bedizen it with every paltry bead and spangle of cheap religious merchandize. He praises austerity; and his converted muse still loves the earrings, the crisping-pins, and the pots of rouge. Where Herbert could be content with a field daisy for an offering, Crashaw must fasten with wire to his Magdalen or his Virgin a brilliant basketful of roses in coloured muslin.

V

MILTON: CIVIL LIBERTY

I

MILTON's prose works form the true complement of his poems. Two words may be said to express in brief the tendency of his total effort as a poet and as a combatant in prose-the words liberty and obedience. All his greater writings in verse revolve around the idea of obedience; all his writings in prose are concerned with liberty, with deliverance from a lower rule as the condition of obedience to a higher rule. He wages war against custom, tradition, tyranny in Church and in State, for the sake of what seems to him a nobler order and a stricter allegiance. Loyalty to the Divine order, a free obedience to that law which is supremely righteous is Milton's dominant idea.

His writings in prose, taken as a whole, are commonly represented as of temporary and transitory interest, claiming attention in their own day but with little significance for ours. The political historian notices them in passing as incidents of a period of civil and religious strife. The biographer is tempted to regard them as an unhappy episode which diverted the poet from his true line of development; he points to them, with Mark Pattison, as examples of "the

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