large books of day,
Combin'd against this breast at once break in,
And take away from me myself and sin;
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy pow'r of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and seal'd thee his;
By all the heavens thou hast in him,
(Fair sister of the seraphim)
By all of him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die."

The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the dead colourlessness of the
beginning, and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur
all over Crashaw's work.

He was a much younger man than either of the poets with whom we have
leashed him, and his birth year used to be put at 1616, though Dr. Grosart
has made it probable that it was three years earlier. His father was a
stern Anglican clergyman of extremely Protestant leanings, his mother died
when Crashaw was young, but his stepmother appears to have been most
unnovercal. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse, and then went to
Cambridge, where in 1637 he became a fellow of Peterhouse, and came in for
the full tide of high church feeling, to which (under the mixed influence
of Laud's policy, of the ascetic practices of the Ferrars of Gidding, and
of a great architectural development afterwards defaced if not destroyed by
Puritan brutality) Cambridge was even more exposed than Oxford. The
outbreak of the civil war may or may not have found Crashaw at Cambridge;
he was at any rate deprived of his fellowship for not taking the covenant
in 1643, and driven into exile. Already inclined doctrinally and in matters
of practice to the older communion, and despairing of the resurrection of
the Church of England after her sufferings at the hands of the Parliament,
Crashaw joined the Church of Rome, and journeyed to its metropolis. He was
attached to the suit of Cardinal Pallotta, but is said to have been shocked
by Italian manners. The cardinal procured him a canonry at Loretto, and