Take The Weeper of Crashaw--his most flagrant poem. Its follies
are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and
abundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the
flagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing that
general sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I am
therefore shy even of citing the "brisk cherub" who has early
sipped the Saint's tear: "Then to his music," in Crashaw's
divinely simple phrase; and his singing "tastes of this breakfast
all day long." Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and when
sorrow would be seen in state, "then is she drest by none but
thee." Then you come upon the fancy, "Fountain and garden in one
face." All places, times, and objects are "Thy tears' sweet
opportunity." If these charming passages lurk in his worst poems,
the reader of this anthology will not be able to count them in his
best. In the Epiphany Hymn the heavens have found means
'To disinherit the sun's rise,
Delicately to displace
The day, and plant it fairer in thy face."
To the Morning: Satisfaction for Sleep, is, all through, luminous.
It would be difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of that
time, more daylight or more spirit. True, an Elizabethan would not
have had poetry so rich as in Love's Horoscope, but yet an
Elizabethan would have had it no fresher.
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