Michael, at St. Michael's Mount;
Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast;
Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land's End.
Arethusa and Mincius--Sicilian and Italian streams--represent the
pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.
ON A PRAYER-BOOK
"Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for a
brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his
own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and
despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line -
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,"
and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry
word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace,
of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century--
not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no
reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that
company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal,
generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave
now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest
and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of
Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of
Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope
and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to
call a "rage," and this expatiated (to use another word of their
own) beyond all bounds.
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