this he hastened to take up, but died in 1649 with suspicions of poison,
which are not impossibly, but at the same time by no means necessarily
true. His poems had already appeared under the double title of _Steps to
the Temple_ (sacred), and _Delights of the Muses_ (profane), but not under
his own editorship, or it would seem with his own choice of title. Several
other editions followed,--one later than his death, with curious
illustrations said to be, in part at least, of his own design. Manuscript
sources, as in the case of some other poets of the time, have considerably
enlarged the collection since. But a great part of it consists of epigrams
(in the wide sense, and almost wholly sacred) in the classical tongues,
which were sometimes translated by Crashaw himself. These are not always
correct in style or prosody, but are often interesting. The famous line in
reference to the miracle of Cana,

"Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum,"

is assigned to Crashaw as a boy at Cambridge; of his later faculty in the
same way the elaborate and, in its way, beautiful poem entitled _Bulla_
(the Bubble) is the most remarkable.

Our chief subject, however, is the English poems proper, sacred and
profane. In almost all of these there is noticeable an extraordinary
inequality, the same in kind, if not in degree, as that on which we have
commented in the case of _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is never quite so
great as there; but he is often quite as small. His exasperating lack of
self-criticism has sometimes led selectors to make a cento out of his
poems--notably in the case of the exceedingly pretty "Wishes to His Unknown
Mistress," beginning, "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall
command my heart and me"--a poem, let it be added, which excuses this
dubious process much less than most, inasmuch as nothing in it is
positively bad, though it is rather too long. Here is the opening, preceded
by a piece from another poem, "A Hymn to Saint Theresa":--

"Those rare works, where thou shalt leave writ
Love's noble history, with wit
Taught thee by none but him, while here
They feed our souls, shall clothe thine there
Each heavenly word by whose hid flame
Our hard hearts shall strike fire, the same
Shall flourish on thy brows and be
Both fire to us and flame to thee:
Whose light shall live bright, in thy face
By glory, in our hearts by grace.

"Thou shalt look round about,