What have I said? That I'll do this That am so false and weak, And have so often done amiss, And did my covenants break? I mean, Lord--all this shall be done If thou my heart wilt raise; And as the work must be thine own, So also shall the praise. The allegory is so good that one is absolutely sorry when it breaks down, and the poem says in plain words that which is the subject of the figures, bringing truths unmasked into the midst of the maskers who represent truths--thus interrupting the pleasure of the artistic sense in the transparent illusion. 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 Æolian 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!