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; 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, 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, He shooke himselfe, and spread his spatious wings, The judge of torments and the king of teares, His eyes, the sullen dens of Death and Night, 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 Mad with spight, He markt how the poore shepheards ran to pay Was the great businesse both of Heav'n and earth. He cannot comprehend That He Whom the sun serves should faintly peepe That Glories Self should serve our griefs and feares, Yet he sees that his power is seriously threatened, Hail, sister springs! Parents of sylver-footed rills! Heavens thy fair eyes be; And starres thou sow'st, whose harvest dares 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! And by thy thirsts of love more large then they; That seiz'd thy parting soul, and seal'd thee His; (Fair sister of the seraphim!); By all of Him we have in thee, 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 Of the new-saluted Day; His tender toppe not fully spread ; And with the rush of one rude blast All his leaves so fresh and sweet, To blot the newly blossomed light. 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 closer straines, and ere the warre begin, Quicke volumes of wild notes; to let him know He throwes his arme, and with a long drawne dash With her sweet selfe shee wrangles. Hee amazed Of short, thicke sobs, whose thundring volleyes float In that sweet soyle; it seemes a holy quire And lay the ground-worke of her hopefull song, 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 Or to thy selfe, sing thine own obsequie: The lute's light genius now does proudly rise, 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, 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, A face that's best By its owne beauty drest, And can alone commend the rest. A cheeke where Youth, 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? 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 In a bed of reverend snow? In sum, would'st see a man that can Live to be old, and still a man? 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, |