w in
his tasteless use of conceits. When he, in _The Weeper_ just above referred
to, calls the tears of Magdalene "Wat'ry brothers," and "Simpering sons of
those fair eyes," and when, in the most intolerable of all the poet's
excesses, the same eyes are called "Two waking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans," which follow our Lord about the hills of
Galilee, it is almost difficult to know whether to feel most contempt or
indignation for a man who could so write. It is fair to say that there are
various readings and omissions in the different editions which affect both
these passages. Yet the offence is that Crashaw should ever have written
them at all. Amends, however, are sure to be made before the reader has
read much farther. Crashaw's longest poems--a version of Marini's _Sospetto
d'Herode_, and one of the rather overpraised "Lover and Nightingale" story
of Strada--are not his best; the metre in which both are written, though
the poet manages it well, lacks the extraordinary charm of his lyric
measures. It does not appear that the "Not impossible she" ever made her
appearance, and probably for a full half of his short life Crashaw burnt
only with religious fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as he
has, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred and profane, has
dropped such notes of ethereal music. At his best he is far above singing,
at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is never
coarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull; and everywhere he
makes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry. Mr. Pope, who borrowed not
a little from him, thought, indeed, that you could find nothing of "The
real part of poetry" (correct construction and so forth) in Crashaw; and
Mr. Hayley gently rebukes Cowley (after observing that if Pope borrowed
from Crashaw, it was "as the sun borrows from the earth") for his "glowing
panegyrick." Now, if the real part of poetry is anywhere in Hayley, or
quintessentially in Pope, it certainly is not in Crashaw.

The group or school (for it is not easy to decide on either word, and
objections might be taken to each) at the head of which Herrick, Carew, and
Crashaw must be placed, and which included Herbert and his band of sacred
singers, included also not a few minor groups, sufficiently different from
each other, but all marked off sharply from the innovating and classical
school of Waller and his followers, which it