I will give from Crashaw a
specimen of the kind of it. Avoiding a more sacred object, one stanza
from a poem of thirty-one, most musical, and full of lovely speech
concerning the tears of Mary Magdalen, will suit my purpose.
Hail, sister springs,
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever-bubbling things!
Thawing crystal! Snowy hills,
Still spending, never spent!--I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!
The poem is called _The Weeper_, and is radiant of delicate fancy. But
surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy
sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with
her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching
the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her
little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of
amorous words, a coldness like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of
icicles shining in the moon.
But I almost reproach myself for introducing Crashaw thus. I had to point
out the fact, and now having done with it, I could heartily wish I had
room to expatiate on his loveliness even in such poems as _The Weeper_.
His _Divine Epigrams_ are not the most beautiful, but they are to me the
most valuable of his verses, inasmuch as they make us feel afresh the
truth which he sets forth anew.
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