The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume IICrashaw, Richard
General
The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume II
Crashaw, Richard
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
'Awake, my soul, and come away!
Put on thy best array;
Least if thou longer stay,
Thou lose some minitts of so blest a day.
Goe run,
And bid good-morrow to the sun;
Welcome his safe return
To Capricorn;
And that great Morne
Wherein a God was borne,
Whose story none can tell,
But He whose every word's a miracle.'
(Our ed. of Bp. Taylor's Poems, pp. 22-3.)
_En passant_, since our edition of Bishop Taylor's Poems was issued we
have discovered that a 'Christmas Anthem or Carol by T.P.,' which
appeared in James Clifford's 'Divine Services and Anthems' (1663), is
Bishop Taylor's Hymn. This we learn from 'The Musical Times,' Feb. 1st,
1871, in a paper on Clifford's book. Criticising the words as by an
unknown T.P.--ignorant that he was really criticising Bp. Jeremy
Taylor--the (I suppose) learned Writer thus appreciatively writes of the
grand Hymn and these passionate yearning words: 'Who, for instance,
could seriously sing in church such stuff as the following Christmas
Anthem or Carol, by T.P.? which Mr. William Childe (not yet made Doctor)
had set to music.' Ahem! And so on, in stone-eyed, stone-eared
stupidity.--Of modern celebrations I name as worthy of higher
recognition than it has received the following 'Hymn to the Week above
every Week,' by Thomas H. Gill; Lon., Mudie, 1844 (pp. 24). There is no
little of the rich quaint matter and manner of our elder Singers in this
fine Poem.
[31] Cf. vol. i. p. 143.
[32] Like Macaulay in his History of England (1st edition), Dr.
Macdonald by an oversight speaks of Crashaw as 'expelled from _Oxford_,'
instead of Cambridge (cf. our vol. i. p. 32).
[33] The Letter of Pope to Mr. Henry Cromwell is in all the editions of
his Correspondence. Willmott (as before) also gives it _in extenso_. Of
The Weeper Pope says: 'To confirm what I have said, you need but look
into his first poem of The Weeper, where the 2d, 4th, 6th, 14th, 21st
stanzas are as sublimely dull as the 7th, 8th, 9th, 16th, 17th, 20th,
and 23d stanzas of the same copy are soft and pleasing. And if these
last want anything, it is an easier and more unaffected expression. The
remaining thoughts in that poem might have been spared, being either but
repetitions, or very trivial and mean. And by this example one may guess
at all the rest to be like this; a mixture of tender gentle thoughts and
suitable expressions, of forced and inextricable conceits, and of
needless fillers-up of the rest,' &c. &c. 'Sweet' is the loftiest
epithet Pope uses for Crashaw, and that in the knowledge of the
'Suspicion of Herod.' In The Weeper he passes some of the very finest
things. In his Abelard and Eloisa he incorporates felicities from
Crashaw's 'Alexias' within inverted commas; but elsewhere is not very
careful to mark indebtedness.
[34] He also quotes, as complete in themselves and 'best alone,' these
two lines from No. LI.:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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