epresent truths--thus interrupting the pleasure of the artistic sense in
the transparent illusion.

The command of metrical form in Baxter is somewhat remarkable. He has not
much melody, but he keeps good time in a variety of measures.

CHAPTER XVII.

CRASHAW AND MARVELL.

I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw.
Indeed he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that
class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are
ever floating in the upper air of it.

What I said of a peculiar AEolian word-music in William Drummond applies
with equal truth to Crashaw; while of our own poets, somehow or other, he
reminds me of Shelley, in the silvery shine and bell-like melody both of
his verse and his imagery; and in one of his poems, _Music's Duel_, the
fineness of his phrase reminds me of Keats. But I must not forget that it
is only with his sacred, his best poems too, that I am now concerned.

The date of his birth is not known with certainty, but it is judged about
1616, the year of Shakspere's death. He was the son of a Protestant
clergyman zealous even to controversy. By a not unnatural reaction
Crashaw, by that time, it is said, a popular preacher, when expelled from
Oxford in 1644 by the Puritan Parliament because of his refusal to sign
their Covenant, became a Roman Catholic. He died about the age of
thirty-four, a canon of the Church of Loretto. There is much in his
verses of that sentimentalism which, I have already said in speaking of
Southwell, is rife in modern Catholic poetry. I will give from Crashaw a
specimen of the kind of it. Avoiding a more sacred object, one stanza
from a poem of thirty-one, most musical, and full of lovely speech
concerning the tears of Mary Magdalen, will suit my purpose.

Hail, sister springs,
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever-bubbling things!
Thawing crystal! Snowy hills,
Still spending, never spent!--I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!

The poem is called _The Weeper_, and is radiant of delicate fancy. But
surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy
sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with
her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching
the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her
little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of
amorous words, a cold