Duchess's own, such as those descriptive of the elf queen :

She on a dewy leaf doth bathe,

And as she sits, the leaf doth wave; There like a new-fallen flake of snow, Doth her white limbs in beauty shew. Her garments fair her maids put on, Made of the pure light from the sun. Mirth and Melancholy deals with allegorical personifications. The former woos the poetess to dwell with her, promising sport and pleasure, and drawing a gloomy but forcible sketch of her rival Melancholy :

Her voice is low, and gives a hollow sound;
She hates the light, and is in darkness found;
Or sits with blinking lamps, or tapers small,
Which various shadows make against the wall.
She loves nought else but noise which discord makes,
As croaking frogs whose dwelling is in lakes;
The raven's hoarse, the mandrake's hollow groan,
And shrieking owls which fly i' the night alone;
The tolling bell, which for the dead rings out;
A mill, where rushing waters run about ;
The roaring winds, which shake the cedars tall,
Plough up the seas, and beat the rocks withal.
She loves to walk in the still moonshine night,
And in a thick dark grove she takes delight;
In hollow caves, thatched houses, and low cells,
She loves to live, and there alone she dwells.

These are fragments from the Lives :

The White-Coats.

Amongst the rest of his army, my lord had chosen for his own regiment of foot 3000 of such valiant, stout, and faithful men (whereof many were bred in the moorish grounds of the northern parts) that they were ready to die at my lord's feet, and never gave over, whensoever they were engaged in action, until they had either conquer'd the enemy or lost their lives. They were called White-Coats for this following reason: My lord being resolved to give them new liveries, and there being not red cloth enough to be had, took up so much of white as would serve to cloath them, desiring withal their patience until he had got it dyed; but they impatient of stay, requested my lord that he would be pleased to let them have it un-dyed as it was, promising they themselves would die it in the enemies blood: which request my lord granted them, and from that time they were called White-Coats.

The Duke's Diet.

In his diet he is so sparing and temperate, that he never eats nor drinks beyond his set proportion, so as to satisfie onely his natural appetite: he makes but one meal a day, at which he drinks two good glasses of smallbeer, one about the beginning, the other at the end thereof, and a little glass of sack in the middle of his dinner; which glass of sack he also uses in the morning for his breakfast, with a morsel of bread. His supper consists of an egg and a draught of small-beer. And by this temperance he finds himself very healthful, and may yet live many years, he being now of the age of seventy three, which I pray God from my soul to grant him.

His Recreation and Exercise.

His prime pastime and recreation hath always been the exercise of mannage and weapons; which heroick

arts he used to practise every day; but I observing that when he had over-heated himself, he would be apt to take cold, prevail'd so far that at last he left the frequent use of the mannage, using nevertheless still the exercise of weapons; and though he doth not ride himself so frequently as he hath done, yet he takes delight in seeing his horses of mannage rid by his escuyers, whom he instructs in that art for his own pleasure. But in the art of weapons (in which he has a method beyond all that ever were famous in it, found out by his own ingenuity and practice) he never taught any body but the now Duke of Buckingham, whose guardian he hath been, and his own two sons. The rest of his time he spends in musick, poetry, architecture and the like.

The Lives were edited in 1872 by Mr Lower, and in 1886 by Mr C. H. Firth. The Life of the Duchess and a selection from her poems and other works were edited by Mr Jenkins in 1872.

Richard Crashaw, the most mystical of the English poets, was the only child of William Crashaw (1572-1626), a Puritan incumbent of Whitechapel, himself a writer of religious poems as well as a strenuous controversialist. Richard, probably born in 1612, was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship at Peterhouse in 1637. He spent much of the following years in religious offices and in writing devotional poetry, and, as the preface to his works tells us, 'like a primitive saint, offering more prayers by night than others usually offer in the day.' His intimacy with Nicholas Ferrar and his own Catholic tendencies led him and five other Fellows to refuse the Solemn League and Covenant, whereupon, in 1643, he was ejected by the Parliamentary Commissioners, found his way to Paris, endured great privation, and became a convert to the Roman Catholic faith. Through the friendship of Cowley, Crashaw obtained the notice of Henrietta Maria, then (1646) at Paris, and was recommended by her about 1648 to the dignitaries of the Church in Italy. At first attached to the service of Cardinal Palotta in Rome, he then became a sub-canon of the church of Loretto; and there he died in August 1649. memory in one of the language (see page 644).

Cowley honoured his finest elegies in the

While at Cambridge, Crashaw published, in 1634, a volume of Latin poems and epigrams, in one of which—not otherwise noteworthy-occurs the famous line on the miracle at Cana :

Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit. The conceit is found already in a hymn of St Ambrose. Crashaw's not very perfect pentameter has been very variously Englished and quoted. The rendering by Pope's friend, Aaron Hill, is :

The bashful stream hath seen its God and blush'd; and Dryden has it in this form :

The conscious water saw its God and blush'd. Mr Grosart quotes a French version of it by Victor Hugo.

In 1646, on the eve of his departure for France, appeared Crashaw's English poems, Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with other Delights of the Muses. The greater part of the volume consists of religious poetry, in which the poet addresses the Saviour, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene, with all the passionate earnestness and fervour of a lover. He had a warm admiration for the ecstatic writings of St Teresa, to whom two of his best poems or hymns are addressed. Of the hymns Coleridge says: 'These verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if indeed . . . they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem.' In these flights into the third heavens, 'with all his garlands and singing robes about him,' Crashaw, whom Dr George Macdonald calls 'the loveliest of our angel-birds,' as hardly having a foothold on this world, but floating in the upper air of it, expatiates amidst

An hundred thousand loves and graces,
And many a mystic thing

Which the divine embraces

Of the dear Spouse of Spirits with them will bring; For which it is no shame

That dull mortality must not know a name. Such seem to have been his daily contemplations, the heavenly manna on which his young spirit fed with delight. This mystical mode of thought and fancy naturally led to exaggeration and to conceits. Conceits pervaded all the poetry of the time, and Crashaw could hardly escape the infection, even if there had not been in his case special predisposing causes. But amidst all his abstractions, metaphors, and apostrophes, Crashaw is seldom tedious. His imagination was only too copious, and what Coleridge called his 'power and opulence of invention,' at times wonderfully suggestive, was unbridled. Coleridge says he gave in his poems the full ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form; and Swinburne notes the 'dazzling intricacy and affluence in refinement, the supple and cunning implication, the choiceness and subtlety,' of the poet. Though his ardour is genuine, at times his fantastic imagery and incongruous conceits tend to make solemn things all but ludicrous. But his versification is sometimes highly musical; and except Milton no poet of his day (not Cowley, whom his age preferred) is so rich in the genuine ore of poetry. He had much in common with George Herbert, but, if more melodious and less crabbed, is less simple and direct. Unhappily his life was short, and even in it he did not realise his own dream (page 680): A happy soul, that all the way

To heaven hath a summer's day.

The poet was an accomplished scholar, and his translations from the Latin and Italian possess both force and beauty. He translated part of the Sospetto d'Herode from the Italian of Giambattista Marino (or Marini), from whom the overloading of poetry with conceits was called stilo Marinesco or

Marinism; but Crashaw outdid Marino in Marinism, and to the Italian's conceits added many ornaments of his own.

Crashaw's motives in joining the Church of Rome were naturally suspected by unfriends in his own day, and, rather on theological than æsthetical grounds, Puritans like Prynne denounced him as a 'fickle shuttlecock' and 'pitiful wire-drawer.' In the reign of 'good taste and common sense' his poetry had few admirers: even during the romantic revival Hazlitt grouped him (oddly enough) with Donne and Davies, as having mistaken learning for poetry, and spoke unsympathetically of his seething brain' and of his ‘pouring out his devout raptures and zealous enthusiasm in a torrent of poetical hyperboles.' Coleridge, as we have seen, proclaimed his direct influence on Christabel; parallels have been found in Shelley; and many poets and critics in the later half of the nineteenth century have acknowledged Crashaw's fascination. Crashaw thus describes the abode of Satan : Below the bottome of the great Abysse, There, where one center reconciles all things, The World's profound heart pants; there placed is Mischiefe's old master; close about him clings A curl'd knot of embracing snakes, that kisse His correspondent cheekes: these loathsome strings Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties

Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies. . .

Struck with these great concurrences of things,
Symptomes so deadly unto Death and him,
Faine would he have forgot what fatall strings
Eternally bind each rebellious limbe;

He shooke himselfe, and spread his spatious wings,
Which like two bosom'd sailes, embrace the dimme
Aire with a dismall shade, but all in vaine :
Of sturdy adamant is his strong chaine.
While thus Heav'n's highest counsails, by the low
Footsteps of their effects, he trac'd too well,
He tost his troubled eyes-embers that glow
Now with new rage, and wax too hot for Hell;
With his foule clawes he fenc'd his furrowed brow,
And gave a gastly shreeke, whose horrid yell
Ran trembling through the hollow vault of Night,
The while his twisted tayle he gnaw'd for spight.

The judge of torments and the king of teares,
He fills a burnisht throne of quenchlesse fire :
And for his old faire roabes of light, he weares
A gloomy mantle of darke flames; the tire
That crownes his hated head on high appeares :
Where seav'n tall hornes (his empire's pride) aspire.
And to make up Hell's majesty, each horne
Seav'n crested Hydras, horribly adorne.

His eyes, the sullen dens of Death and Night,
Startle the dull ayre with a dismall red :
Such his fell glances, as the fatall light
Of s'aring comets, that looke kingdomes dead.
From his black nostrills and blew lips, in spight
Of Hell's owne stinke, a worser stench is spread.
His breath Hell's lightning is: and each deepe groane
Disdaines to think that Heav'n thunders alone.

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation,

Unto a dreadfull pile gives fiery breath; Whose unconsum'd consumption preys upon The never-dying life of a long death.

In this sad house of slow destruction,

(His shop of flames) hee fryes himself, beneath

A masse of woes; his teeth for torment gnash, While his steele sides sound with his tayle's strong lash. Satan remembers his own quarrel with Heaven, and notes that his future prospects are darker:

Heaven's golden-winged herald late he saw
To a poore Galilean virgin sent;

Mad with spight,

He markt how the poore shepheards ran to pay
Their simple tribute to the Babe whose Birth

Was the great businesse both of Heav'n and earth. He cannot comprehend

That He Whom the sun serves should faintly peepe
Through clouds of infant flesh that He the old
Eternall Word should be a child, and weepe:
That He Who made the fire should feare the cold:
That Heav'n's high Majesty His court should keepe
In a clay-cottage by each blast control'd:

That Glories Self should serve our griefs and feares,
And from Eternity submit to yeares.

Yet he sees that his power is seriously threatened,
fears that hell too may be wrested from him, and
takes counsel with the powers of hell, and com-
missions Cruelty to go and stir up Herod to
jealousy and suspicion against the Babe (hence the
title of the poem), and to take steps at once to
defend himself and carry out Satan's schemes.
The beginning of Sainte Mary Magdalene or the
Weeper is characteristic:

Hail, sister springs!

Parents of sylver-footed rills!
Ever-bubling things!
Thawing crystall! Snowy hills
Still spending, never spent! I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!

Heavens thy fair eyes be;
Heavens of ever-falling starres.
'Tis seed-time still with thee;

And starres thou sow'st, whose harvest dares
Promise the Earth to counter-shine
Whatever makes heavn's forehead fine.

The Flaming Heart (upon the book and picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa, as she is usually expressed with a seraphim biside her ') ends thus:

O thou undanted daughter of desires!
By all thy dowr of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectuall day,

And by thy thirsts of love more large then they;
By all thy brim-fill'd bowles of feirce desire,
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdome of that finall kisse

That seiz'd thy parting soul, and seal'd thee His;
By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him

(Fair sister of the seraphim!);

By all of Him we have in thee,
Leave nothing of my self in me.
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may dy.

The first of the following elaborate similes or little allegories reminds us of a passage in Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, and the second of one of Shakespeare's best-known sonnets :

I've seen indeed the hopefull bud

Of a ruddy rose that stood
Blushing to behold the ray

Of the new-saluted Day;

His tender toppe not fully spread ;
The sweet dash of a shower new shead,
Invited him no more to hide
Within himselfe the purple pride
Of his forward flower; when lo,
While he sweetly 'gan to shew
His swelling gloryes, Auster spide him ;
Cruel Auster thither hy'd him,

And with the rush of one rude blast
Sham'd not spitefully to wast

All his leaves so fresh and sweet,
And lay them trembling at his feet.
I've seen the Morning's lovely ray
Hover o'er the new-borne Day,
With rosie wings, so richly bright,
As if he scorned to thinke of Night,
When a ruddy storme, whose scowle
Made heaven's radiant face looke foule,
Call'd for an untimely night

To blot the newly blossomed light.
But were the roses' blush so rare,
Were the Morning's smile so faire
As is he, nor cloud nor wind

But would be courteous, would be kind. Amidst his visions of angels ascending and descending, Crashaw had little time to devote to earthly love. But the second part of the Steps is mainly secular, and contains elegies, epitaphs, and even verses in praise of women. We quote entire his version of Musick's Duell, based, like the paraphrase in Ford's Lover's Melancholy (see page 481), on the Latin of the Roman Jesuit professor Strada. It is a version, not a translation, and much of the substance is Crashaw's own:

Now westward Sol had spent the richest beams
Of noon's high glory, when, hard by the streams
Of Tiber, on the sceane of a greene plat,
Under protection of an oake there sate
A sweet Lute's-master, in whose gentle aires
He lost the daye's heat, and his owne hot cares.
Close in the covert of the leaves there stood
A Nightingale, come from the neighbouring wood
(The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,
Their muse, their syren, harmless syren she).
There stood she listning, and did entertaine
The musick's soft report, and mold the same
In her owne murmures, that whatever mood
His curious fingers lent, her voyce made good:
The man perceiv'd his rivall, and her art,
Dispos'd to give the light-foot lady sport,
Awakes his lute, and 'gainst the fight to come
Informs it in a sweet præludium

Of closer straines, and ere the warre begin,
He lightly skirmishes on every string,
Charg'd with a flying touch: and streightway she
Carves out her dainty voyce as readily,
Into a thousand sweet distinguish'd tones,
And reckons up in soft divisions

Quicke volumes of wild notes; to let him know
By that shrill taste, she could do something too.
His nimble hands' instinct then taught each string
A capring cheerefullnesse; and made them sing
To their owne dance; now negligently rash

He throwes his arme, and with a long drawne dash
Blends all together; then distinctly tripps
From this to that; then quicke returning skipps
And snatches this again, and pauses there.
Shee measures every measure, every where
Meets art with art; sometimes as if in doubt,
Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out,
Trayles her plaine ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleeke passage of her open throat,
A cleare unwrinckled song; then doth shee point it
With tender accents, and severely joynt it
By short diminutives, that being rear'd
In controverting warbles evenly shar'd,

With her sweet selfe shee wrangles. Hee amazed
That from so small a channell should be rais'd
The torrent of a voyce, whose melody
Could melt into such sweet variety,
Straines higher yet, that tickled with rare art
The tatling strings (each breathing in his part)
Most kindly doe fall out; the grumbling base
In surly groans disdaines the treble's grace;
The high-perch't treble chirps at this, and chides,
Untill his finger (Moderatour) hides
And closes the sweet quarrell, rowsing all,
Hoarce, shrill at once; as when the trumpets call
Hot Mars to th' harvest of Death's field, and woo
Men's hearts into their hands: this lesson too
Shee gives him back; her supple brest thrills out
Sharpe aires, and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetnesse, hovers o're her skill,
And folds in wav'd notes with a trembling bill
The plyant series of her slippery song;
Then starts shee suddenly into a throng

Of short, thicke sobs, whose thundring volleyes float
And roule themselves over her lubrick throat
In panting murmurs, 'still'd out of her breast,
That ever-bubling spring; the sugred nest
Of her delicious soule, that there does lye
Bathing in streames of liquid melodie ;
Musick's best seed-plot, whence in ripen'd aires
A golden-headed harvest fairly reares
His honey-dropping tops, plow'd by her breath,
Which there reciprocally laboureth

In that sweet soyle; it seemes a holy quire
Founded to th' name of great Apollo's lyre,
Whose silver-roofe rings with the sprightly notes
Of sweet-lipp'd angel-imps, that swill their throats
In creame of morning Helicon, and then
Preferre soft-anthems to the eares of men,
To woo them from their beds, still murmuring
That men can sleepe while they their mattens sing
(Most divine service), whose so early lay
Prevents the eye-lidds of the blushing Day!
There you might heare her kindle her soft voyce,
In the close murmur of a sparkling noyse,

And lay the ground-worke of her hopefull song,
Still keeping in the forward streame, so long,
Till a sweet whirle-wind (striving to get out)
Heaves her soft bosome, wanders round about,
And makes a pretty earthquake in her breast,
Till the fledg'd notes at length forsake their nest,
Fluttering in wanton shoales, and to the sky,
Wing'd with their owne wild ecchos, pratling fly.
Shee opes the floodgate, and lets loose a tide
Of streaming sweetnesse, which in state doth ride
On the way'd backe of every swelling straine,
Rising and falling in a pompous traine.
And while she thus discharges a shrill peale
Of flashing aires, she qualifies their zeale
With the coole epode of a graver noat,
Thus high, thus low, as if her silver throat

Would reach the brazen voyce of War's hoarce bird; Her little soule is ravisht, and so pour'd

Into loose extasies, that she is plac't

Above her selfe, Musick's Enthusiast.

Shame now and anger mixt a double staine
In the Musitian's face; yet once againe,
Mistresse! I come; now reach a straine, my lute,
Above her mocke, or be for ever mute;
Or tune a song of victory to me,

Or to thy selfe, sing thine own obsequie:
So said, his hands sprightly as fire, he flings
And with a quavering coynesse tasts the strings.
The sweet-lip't sisters, musically frighted,
Singing their feares, are fearefully delighted,
Trembling as when Apollo's golden haires
Are fan'd and frizled, in the wanton ayres
Of his own breath, which marryed to his lyre
Doth tune the spheares, and make Heaven's selfe looke
From this to that, from that to this he flyes, [higher.
Feeles Musick's pulse in all her arteryes;
Caught in a net which there Apollo spreads,
His fingers struggle with the vocall threads.
Following those little rills, he sinkes into
A sea of Helicon; his hand does goe
Those pathes of sweetnesse which with nectar drop,
Softer than that which pants in Hebe's cup.
The humourous strings expound his learnèd touch,
By various glosses; now they seeme to grutch,
And murmur in a buzzing dinne, then gingle
In shrill-tongu'd accents, striving to be single.
Every smooth turne, every delicious stroake
Gives life to some new grace; thus doth h' invoke
Sweetnesse by all her names; thus, bravely thus
(Fraught with a fury so harmonious)

The lute's light genius now does proudly rise,
Heav'd on the surges of swolne rapsodyes,
Whose flourish (meteor-like) doth curle the aire
With flash of high-borne fancyes: here and there
Dancing in lofty measures, and anon
Creeps on the soft touch of a tender tone,
Whose trembling murmurs melting in wild aires
Runs to and fro, complaining his sweet cares,
Because those pretious mysteryes that dwell
In Musick's ravish't soule he dares not tell,
But whisper to the world: thus doe they vary
Each string his note, as if they meant to carry
Their Master's blest soule (snatcht out at his eares
By a strong extasy) through all the spheares
Of Musick's heaven, and seat it there on high
In th' empyræum of pure harmony.

At length (after so long, so loud a strife

Of all the strings, still breathing the best life

Of blest variety, attending on

His fingers fairest revolution

In many a sweet rise, many as sweet a fall) A full-mouth'd diapason swallowes all.

This done, he lists what she would say to this, And she, (although her breath's late exercise Had dealt too roughly with her tender throate,) Yet summons all her sweet powers for a noate. Alas! in vaine! for while (sweet soule !) she tryes To measure all those wild diversities

Of chatt'ring strings, by the small size of one Poore simple voyce, rais'd in a naturall tone; She failes, and failing grieves, and grieving dyes. She dyes and leaves her life the Victor's prise, Falling upon his lute: O, fit to have

(That liv'd so sweetly) dead so sweet a grave!

Wishes.

To his Supposed Mistresse.

Who ere she be,

That not impossible she

That shall command my heart and me;

Where ere she lye,

Lock't up from mortall eye,

In shady leaves of Destiny;

Till that ripe birth

Of studied Fate stand forth,

And teach her faire steps tread our Earth;

Till that divine

Idæa take a shrine

Of chrystall flesh, through which to shine;

Meet you her, my wishes,
Bespeake her to my blisses,

And be ye call'd, my absent kisses.

I wish her beauty

That owes not all its duty

To gaudy tire or glistring shoo-tye.

More than the spoyle

Of shop, or silkeworme's toyle,
Or a bought blush, or a set smile.

A face that's best

By its owne beauty drest,

And can alone commend the rest.

A cheeke where Youth,
And blood, with pen of Truth

Write what their reader sweetly ru'th.

Lipps, where all day

A lover's kisse may play,

Yet carry nothing thence away.

Eyes, that displace

The neighbour diamond, and out-face

That sunshine, by their own sweet grace.

Tresses, that weare

Jewells but to declare

How much themselves more pretious are. . . .

Heark hither, reader! wilt thou see

Nature her own physician be?
Wilt see a man all his own wealth,
His own musick, his own health?
A man whose sober soul can tell
How to wear her garments well?
Her garments, that upon her sit,
As garments should do, close and fit?
A well-clothed soul that 's not opprest
Nor choked with what she should be drest?
A soul sheath'd in a crystall shrine,
Through which all her bright features shine?
As when a piece of wanton lawn,

A thin aërial vail, is drawn

O're Beauty's face, seeming to hide,

More sweetly shews the blushing bride;

A soul whose intellectual beams

No mists do mask, no lazie steams?

A happie soul, that all the way

To Heav'n hath a Summer's day?

Would'st see a man whose well-warmed bloud Bathes him in a genuine floud?

A man whose tuned humours be

A seat of rarest harmonie?

Would'st see blithe looks, fresh cheeks, beguile
Age? Would'st see December smile?
Would'st see a nest of roses grow

In a bed of reverend snow?
Warm thoughts, free spirits flattering
Winter's self into a Spring?

In sum, would'st see a man that can

Live to be old, and still a man?
Whose latest and most leaden houres
Fall with soft wings, stuck with soft flowres,
And when Life's sweet fable ends,

His soul and bodie part like friends;

No quarrels, murmures, no delay;

A kisse, a sigh, and so away?

This rare one, reader, wouldst thou see,
Heark hither: and thyself be he.