'Under the abysses, at the very core of the world, In the central point of the universe, Within the bowers of the darkest deep, There stands the fiendly perverse Spirit: With sharp thongs an impure group Binds him with a hundred snakes athwart: With such bonds girds him for ever, The great champion who conquered HIM in Paradise.' Thus we might go over the entire poem, and everywhere we should gather proofs that he was himself all he conceived in his splendid portraiture of the true Poet's genius: 'no rapture makes it live Drest in the glorious madnesse of a Muse, Whose feet can walke the Milky Way, Her starry throne, and hold up an exalted arm To lift me from my lazy urn and climbe Upon the stoopèd shoulders of old Time, And trace eternity.' (vol. i. p. 238.)[38] Fully to estimate Crashaw's own grander imaginative faculty the Reader must study here the now-first-printed and very Miltonic poems on Apocalypse xii. 7 (Vol. II. pp. 231-3) and 'Christe, veni' (_ib._ pp. 223-5). It is profoundly to be regretted that our Poet should have limited himself to Book I. of the 'Strage degli Innocenti,' viz. 'Sospetto d'Herode.' Book VII. especially, 'Della Gerusalemme Distruta,' would have demanded all his powers. The entire poem was 'done in English,' and it is '_done_' (by T.R. 1675). With reference to our own Translations of Crashaw, if in some instances we have enlarged on our original, and adventured to fill-in what in the Latin the Poet is fettered in uttering, may we apologise by pleading his own example as a Translator, though with unequal steps and far off? I would specify the very remarkable 'Bulla,' in which, indeed, I find Crashaw's highest of pure poetic faculty within the region of Fancy in its delicatest and subtlest symbolisms; also the scarcely less remarkable address 'To the Reader' ('Lectori'); and his 'Fides &c. &c.' and his classical legends of 'Arion,' and his University 'Laments' and 'Appeals' for Peterhouse. Throughout, my co-workers and myself have aimed to give the _thought_ of Crashaw; and, unless I egregiously mistake, we have together earned some gratitude from admirers of our Worthy. I leave to other Scholars to deal critically with the Latin and Greek of these Poems and Epigrams now first translated. Read unsympathetically, I fear that very often his quantities and versification will be regarded as barbarous; but we have done something, it is believed, to neutralise Turnbull's most discreditable misprints herein, as in the English Poems. In the places (vol. ii. pp. 5-6, 244, and 332) we have recorded some of his more flagrant blunders; but besides we have silently corrected as many more of the original and early editions.