CHAPTER XVII.
CRASHAW AND MARVELL.
I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw.
Indeed he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that
class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are
ever floating in the upper air of it.
What I said of a peculiar AEolian word-music in William Drummond applies
with equal truth to Crashaw; while of our own poets, somehow or other, he
reminds me of Shelley, in the silvery shine and bell-like melody both of
his verse and his imagery; and in one of his poems, _Music's Duel_, the
fineness of his phrase reminds me of Keats. But I must not forget that it
is only with his sacred, his best poems too, that I am now concerned.
The date of his birth is not known with certainty, but it is judged about
1616, the year of Shakspere's death. He was the son of a Protestant
clergyman zealous even to controversy. By a not unnatural reaction
Crashaw, by that time, it is said, a popular preacher, when expelled from
Oxford in 1644 by the Puritan Parliament because of his refusal to sign
their Covenant, became a Roman Catholic. He died about the age of
thirty-four, a canon of the Church of Loretto. There is much in his
verses of that sentimentalism which, I have already said in speaking of
Southwell, is rife in modern Catholic poetry.
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