III. _His characteristics and place as a Poet._ It is something 'new under the sun' that it should be our privilege well-nigh to double the quantity of the extant Poetry of such a Singer as Richard Crashaw, by printing, for the first time, the treasure-trove of the Sancroft-Tanner MSS.; and by translating (also for the first time) the whole of his Latin poetry. Every element of a true poetic faculty that belongs to his own published Poems is found in the new, while there are new traits alike of character and genius; and our Translations must be as the 'raising' of the lid of a gem-filled casket, shut to the many for these (fully) two hundred years. The admirer of Crashaw hitherto has thus his horizon widened, and I have a kind of feeling that perchance it were wiser to leave the completed Poetry to make its own impression on those who come to it. Nevertheless I must, however briefly, fulfil my promise of an estimate of our Worthy. Four things appear to me to call for examination, in order to give the essentials of Crashaw as a Poet, and to gather his main characteristics: (_a_) Imaginative-sensuousness; (_b_) Subtlety of emotion; (_c_) Epigrams; (_d_) Translations and (briefly) Latin and Greek Poetry. I would say a little on each. (_a_) _Imaginative-sensuousness._ Like 'charity' for 'love,' the word 'sensuous' has deteriorated in our day. It is, I fear, more than in sound and root confused with 'sensual,' in its base application. I use it as Milton did, in the well-known passage when he defined Poetry to be 'simple, _sensuous_, and passionate;' and I qualify 'sensuousness' with 'imaginative,' that I may express our Poet's peculiar gift of looking at everything with a full, open, penetrative eye, yet through his imagination; his imagination not being as spectacles (coloured) astride the nose, but as a light of white glory all over his intellect and entire faculties. Only Wordsworth and Shelley, and recently Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, are comparable with him in this. You can scarcely err in opening on any page in your out-look for it. The very first poem, 'The Weeper,' is lustrous with it. For example, what a grand reach of 'imaginative' comprehensiveness have we so early as in the second stanza, where from the swimming eyes of his 'Magdalene' he was, as it were, swept upward to the broad transfigured sky in its wild ever-varying beauty of the glittering silver rain! 'Heauns thy fair eyes be; Heauens of ever-falling starres. 'Tis seed-time still with thee; And starres thou sow'st whose haruest dares Promise the Earth to counter-shine Whateuer makes heaun's forehead fine.' How grandly vague is that 'counter-shine _whatever_,' as it leads upwards to the 'forehead'--superb, awful, God-crowned--of the 'heauns'! Of the same in kind, but unutterably sweet and dainty also in its exquisiteness, is stanza vii.: