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 coldness like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon.

But I almost reproach myself for introducing Crashaw thus.  I had to point out the fact, and now having done with it, I could heartily wish I had room to expatiate on his loveliness even in such poems as The Weeper.

His Divine Epigrams are not the most beautiful, but they are to me the most valuable of his verses, inasmuch as they make us feel afresh the truth which he sets forth anew.  In them some of the facts of our Lord’s life and teaching look out upon us as from clear windows of the past.  As epigrams, too, they are excellent—­pointed as a lance.