rapture over the evidence of a 'godly sorrow' that has worked to repentance, and in its reward given loveliness and consecration to the tears shed. The moon 'shining on icicles' is the antithesis of the truth. Thus is it throughout, as in the backgrounds of the great Portrait-painters as distinguished from Land-scapists and Sea-scapists and Sky-scapists--Crashaw inevitably works out his thoughts through something he has looked at as transfigured by his imagination, so that you find his most mystical thinking and feeling framed (so to say) with images drawn from Nature. That he did look not at but into Nature, let 'On a foule Morning, being then to take a Journey,' and 'To the Morning; Satisfaction for Sleepe,' bear witness. In these there are penetrative 'looks' that Wordsworth never has surpassed, and a richness almost Shakesperean. Milton must have studied them keenly. There is this characteristic also in the 'sensuousness' of Crashaw, that while the Painter glorifies the ignoble and the coarse (as Hobbima's Asses and red-cloaked Old Women) in introducing it into a scene of Wood, or Way-side, or Sea-shore, his outward images and symbolism are worthy in themselves, and stainless as worthy (passing exceptions only establishing the rule). His epithets are never superfluous, and are, even to surprising nicety, true. Thus he calls Egypt '_white_ Egypt' (vol. i. p. 81); and occurring as this does 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God,' we are reminded again how the youthful Milton must have had this extraordinary composition in his recollection when he composed his immortal Ode.[30] Similarly we have '_hir'd_ mist' (vol. i. p. 84); '_pretious_ losse' (ib.); '_fair-ey'd_ fallacy of Day' (ib. p. 85); '_black_ but faithfull perspectiue of Thee' (ib. p. 86); '_abasèd_ liddes' (ib. p. 88); '_gratious_ robbery' (ib. p. 156); 'thirsts of loue' (ib.); '_timerous_ light of starres' (ib. p. 172); '_rebellious_ eye of Sorrow' (ib. p. 112); and so in hundreds of parallels. Take this from 'To the Name above every Name' (ib. p. 60): 'O come away ... O, see the weary liddes of wakefull Hope-- Love's eastern windowes--all wide ope With curtains drawn, To catch the day-break of Thy dawn. O, dawn at last, long-lookt-for Day, Take thine own wings, and come away.' Comparing Cowley's and Crashaw's 'Hope,' Coleridge thus pronounces on them: 'Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of what we now term sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident;' and he continues, 'In that on the Name of Jesus, equally so; but his lines on St. Teresa are the finest.' 'Where he does combine richness of thought and diction, nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire, Since 'tis not to be had at home . . . . . She'l to the Moores and martyrdom.'[31]