and see
Thousands of crown'd souls throng to be
Themselves thy crown, sons of thy vows:
The virgin births with which thy spouse
Made fruitful thy fair soul; go now
And with them all about thee, bow
To Him, 'Put on' (He'll say) 'put on,
My rosy love, that thy rich zone,
Sparkling with the sacred flames,
Of thousand souls whose happy names
Heaven heaps upon thy score, thy bright
Life brought them first to kiss the light
That kindled them to stars.' And so
Thou with the Lamb thy Lord shall go,
And whereso'er He sets His white
Steps, walk with Him those ways of light.
Which who in death would live to see
Must learn in life to die like thee."

* * * * *

"Whoe'er she be,
That not impossible she,
That shall command my heart and me;

"Where'er she lie,
Lock'd up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of destiny;

"Till that ripe birth
Of studied Fate stand forth,
And teach her fair steps to our earth:

"Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:

"Meet you her, my wishes
Bespeak her to my blisses,
And be ye call'd, my absent kisses."

The first hymn to Saint Theresa, to which _The Flaming Heart_ is a kind of
appendix, was written when Crashaw was still an Anglican (for which he did
not fail, later, to make a characteristic and very pretty, though quite
unnecessary, apology). It has no passage quite up to the
Invocation--Epiphonema, to give it the technical term--of the later poem.
But it is, on the contrary, good almost throughout, and is, for uniform
exaltation, far the best of Crashaw's poems. Yet such uniform exaltation
must be seldom sought in him. It is in his little bursts, such as that in
the stanza beginning, "O mother turtle dove," that his charm consists.
Often, as in verse after verse of _The Weeper_, it has an unearthly
delicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has ever
equalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casual
and unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of diction
which the greatest lyric poets since--Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson,
Mr. Swinburne--have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneously
recovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The very
maddest and most methodless of the "Metaphysicals" cannot touch Crasha