no deep religious life—­with it, in excess, we fear for the weakness of a partial development.  There is so much gain, however, to the poet, that we have no disposition to take exception to the single string of Crashaw.  The beauty of the Venus was made up from the charms of many models.  So, in our libraries, as in life, we must be content with parcel-work, and take one man’s wisdom and another’s sentiment, looking out that we get something of each to enrich our multifarious life.

Crashaw’s poetry is one musical echo and aspiration.  He finds his theme and illustration constantly in music.  His amorous descant never fails him:  his lute is always by his side.  Following the “Steps of the Temple,” a graceful tribute to Herbert, we have the congenial title, “The Delights of the Muses,” opening with that exquisite composition: 

    “Untwisting all the chains that tie
    The hidden soul of harmony,”

“Music’s Duel.”  It is the story—­a favorite one to the ears of our forefathers two centuries ago—­of the nightingale and the musician contending with voice and instrument in alternate melodies, till the sweet songstress of the grove falls and dies upon the lute of her rapt rival.  It is something more than a pretty tale.  Ford, the dramatist, introduced it briefly in happy lines in “The Lover’s Melancholy,” but Crashaw’s verses inspire the very sweetness and lingering pleasure of the contest.  It is high noon when the “sweet lute’s master” seeks retirement from the heat, “on the scene of a green plat, under protection of an oak,” by the bank of the Tiber.  The “light-foot lady,”

    “The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,”

“entertains the music’s soft report,” which begins with a flying prelude, to which the lady of the tree “carves out her dainty voice” with “quick volumes of wild notes.”

    “His nimble hand’s instinct then taught each string,
    A cap’ring cheerfulness; and made them sing
    To their own dance.”

She

    “Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
    Through the sleek passage of her open throat: 
    A clear, unwrinkled song.”

The contention invites every art of expression.  The highest powers of the lute are evoked in rapid succession closing with a martial strain: 

                              “this lesson, too,
    She gives him back, her supple breast thrills out
    Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt
    Of dallying sweetness, hovers o’er her skill,
    And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill,
    The pliant series of her slippery song;
    Then starts she suddenly into a throng
    Of short thick sobs, whose thund’ring vollies float,
    And roll themselves over her lubric throat
    In panting murmurs, ’still’d out of her breast,
    That ever-bubbling spring, the sugar’d nest
    Of her delicious soul, that there does lie