Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin’s Chapel at Loretto.  He is best known to the general reader by his Wishes for his Unknown Mistress,

  That not impossible she

which is included in most of the anthologies.  His religious poetry expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St. Theresa, “undaunted daughter of desires,” who is the subject of a splendid apostrophe in his poem, The Flaming Heart.  Crashaw is, in fact, a poet of passages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits.  In one of his Latin epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana: 

  Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum: 

as englished by Dryden,

  The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed.

Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton.  His collection of love songs—­the Mistress—­is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling.  He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject—­the Davideis—­now quite unreadable.  Cowley was a royalist, and followed the exiled court to France.

Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers—­Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L’Estrange, and others—­gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their strains.  Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king’s service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs—­To Lucasta on going to the Wars—­in which occur the lines,

  I could not love thee, dear, so much,
    Loved I not honor more—­

and to Althaea from Prison, in which he sings “the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories” of his king, and declares that “stone-walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”  Another of the cavaliers was Sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised a troop of horse for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament and fled to France.  He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite Ballad upon a Wedding.  Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp—­graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling.  Carew, however, showed a nicer sense of form than most of the fantastic school.  Some of his love songs are written with delicate art.  There are noble lines in his elegy on Donne and in one passage of his masque Coelum