Take _The Weeper_ of Crashaw—his most flagrant poem. Its follies are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and abundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the flagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing that general sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I am therefore shy even of citing the ‘brisk cherub’ who has early sipped the Saint’s tear: ‘Then to his music,’ in Crashaw’s divinely simple phrase; and his singing ‘tastes of this breakfast all day long.’ Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and when sorrow would be seen in state, ‘then is she drest by none but thee.’ Then you come upon the fancy, ‘Fountain and garden in one face.’ All places, times, and objects are ‘Thy tears’ sweet opportunity.’ If these charming passages lurk in his worst poems, the reader of this anthology will not be able to count them in his best. In the Epiphany Hymn the heavens have found means ‘To disinherit the sun’s rise, Delicately to displace The day, and plant it fairer in thy face.’ _To the Morning_: _Satisfaction for Sleep_, is, all through, luminous. It would he difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of that time, more daylight or more spirit. True, an Elizabethan would not have had poetry so rich as in _Love’s Horoscope_, but yet an Elizabethan would have had it no fresher. The _Hymn to St. Teresa_ has the brevities which this poet—reproached with his _longueurs_—masters so well. He tells how the Spanish girl, six years old, set out in search of death: ‘She’s for the Moors and Martyrdom. Sweet, not so fast!’ Of many contemporary songs in pursuit of a fugitive Cupid, Crashaw’s _Cupid’s Cryer_: _out of the Greek_, is the most dainty. But if readers should be a little vexed with the poet’s light heart and perpetual pleasure, with the late ripeness of his sweetness, here, for their satisfaction, is a passage capable of the great age that had lately closed when Crashaw wrote. It is in his summons to nature and art: ‘Come, and come strong, To the conspiracy of our spacious song!’ I have been obliged to take courage to alter the reading of the seventeenth and nineteenth lines of the _Prayer-Book_, so as to make them intelligible; they had been obviously misprinted. I have also found it necessary to re-punctuate generally. WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS.—Page 139. This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom with it. I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas that repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious. ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW.—Page 157.