and of its accidental origin in a scribbled note of Pope, I shall write below.

In 1646 appeared Steps to the Temple, with a few secular poems under the sub-title, The Delights of the Muses, by Richard Crashaw. The Steps was so named in modest reference and relation to Herbert's Temple, which was Crashaw's immediate inspiration. Crashaw while a student at Cambridge came under influences which, considering the difference in the two ages, are not incomparable to the Oxford or Tractarian Movement of our own century. In the fervent and pious life of Nicholas Ferrar, into whose hands we have already seen the dying Herbert confiding his poetry, Crashaw found much to emulate and admire. Ferrar, notable in science, and a successful man of affairs, forsook the world and formed, with his kinfolk about him, a small religious community at Little Giddings in Huntingdonshire, where he sought to lead a spiritual life in accord with the principles of the Anglican Church. Predisposed as was Crashaw to that intense and sensuous visualization of spiritual emotion which has characterized the saints and fathers of the Roman Church in many ages, in the life of Saint Theresa the poet found his ideal and his hope. His artistic temperament had led him early "to denounce those who disassociate art from religious worship"; the charity and benignity of his temper caused him equally to oppose those who made an attack upon the papacy an article of faith. It is easy to see 'how this attitude, under the spiritual influence of such men as Herbert, Robert Shelford, and Ferrar, should gradually have led Crashaw, with the help of some added political impetus, over to the old faith. This impetus came in the form of the parliamentary act by which it was provided that all monuments of superstition be removed from the churches and that the fellows of the universities be required to take the oath of the Solemn League and Covenant. On the

enforcement of this act against Peterhouse, Crashaw's own college, and the consequent desecration of its beautiful chapel, Crashaw indignantly refused the League and Covenant, and was expelled from his fellowship. Before long he withdrew to Paris, where he met Cowley. Crashaw died in Italy a few years later, a priest of the Church of Rome. The picture of Cowley, the fair-minded, meditative Epicurean, befriending the young enthusiast, when both were in exile, is pleasant to dwell upon.

The relation of Crashaw to Herbert, save for his discipleship, which changed very little Crashaw's distinctive traits, is much that of Herrick and Carew. Herbert and Crashaw were both good scholars; Herbert knew the world and put it aside as vanity; Crashaw could never have been of the world; his was a nature alien to it, and yet there is a greater warmth in Crashaw than in Herbert. Crashaw turns the passions of earth to worship and identifies the spiritual and the material in his devotion; Herbert has the Puritan spirit within him, which is troubled in the contemplation of earthly vanities, and struggles to rise above and beyond them. It is the antithesis of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, an antithesis which we can understand better if we can bring ourselves to sympathize with each than if we seek to throw ourselves into an attitude of attack or defense of either.

In matter of poetic style, too, despite his quips and conceits, and despite the fact that with him, as with many devotional poets, execution waits upon the thought and often comes limpingly after, Herbert is far more self-restrained, and his poetry of more uniform workmanship and excellence. But if Herbert has never fallen into Crashaw's extravagances, he is equally incapable of his inspired, rhapsodic flights. Herbert felt the beauties of this visible world and has some delicate touches of appreciation, as where he says:

I wish I were a tree

For sure then I should grow

To fruit or shade; at least some bird would trust

Her household to me, and I should be just.1

Crashaw knows less of the concrete objects of the world, but is a creature of light and atmosphere, and revels in color and the gorgeousness thereof. Crashaw often rhapsodizes without bridle, and is open at times to grave criticism on the score of taste. It is for these shortcomings that he has been, time out of mind, the stock example of the dreadful things into which the ill-regulated poetical fancy may fall. The "sister baths" and "portable oceans" of Magdalene are easily ridiculed, but it is almost as easy, while ridiculing these distortions of fancy, to forget the luminousness and radiance, the uncommon imaginative power and volatility of mind if I may venture the term - of this devout Shelley of the reign of Charles I.

Two years after the first edition of Crashaw's poems, appeared Herrick's Noble Numbers, bearing date 1647, but bound in after the Hesperides, 1648. Herrick was too good a poet not to write well on any theme, and some of these devotional and moral poems have the same artless and dainty charm that is possessed in fuller measure by their more worldly sisters. The stately and gracious forms of Anglican worship must have been dear to such a man as Herrick, but it is unlikely that any deep spiritual yearnings disturbed the pastoral serenity of Dean Prior. Herrick is best when his devotional poetry touches the picturesque details of his own life in poems like the Grange, A Thanksgiving for his House, or when the subject grows out of a touching Biblical situation which may be elaborated with art, as in the fine Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter." But even these sincere and beautiful religious lyrics are as ripples on a shallow lake in

1 Herbert, ed. Grosart, p. 40. 2 Pp. 109, 143, and 147 of Hale's ed.

comparison with the crested waves of Crashaw or the deepsea stirrings of Vaughan.

If we look forward we shall find the practice of the sustained religious narrative poem, first popularized by Quarles, continuing down to very late times. Thus Cowley wrote an epic, the Davideis, and Prior esteemed his Solomon the best of his work. Parnell wrote on Moses, Deborah, Hezekiah, and others, Blackmore on all Creation,1 whilst the seemly and graceful turning out of a hymn, meditation, or short Biblical paraphrase became one of the ordinary accomplishments of a gentleman. No less a celebrity than the eminent Mr. Waller wrote cantos of Divine Love, of the Fear of God, and of Divine Poesy, with poetical reflections on the Lord's Prayer2; and his great successors, Dryden and Pope, did not disdain to follow his example in the decorous if occasional practice of a like art.

The gracious and musical lyrics of Andrew Marvell were written in all probability before he took service under the Commonwealth in 1652. Like Milton, Marvell laid aside the companionship of the Muses to fight worldly battles for what he believed to be the right; but, unlike Milton, he never returned to poetry again, but remained in the toil and sweat of battle to the last. Marvell's devotional poems are only a few, but there is about them, as about all the lyrical verse which this rare poet has left us, a moral wholesomeness, a genuine joy in external nature, and withal so wellcontained a grace of expression, that Marvell must be assigned no mean place among the lyrists of his century. Curiously enough, Marvell has extended the pastoral to embrace religious poetry in one or two not unsuccessful

1 Davideis is in Anderson's British Poets, V, 389-426; Prior's, Parnell's and Blackmore's works are in the same collection, VII, 473-492; 25 f., 596-642. 2 Anderson's English Poets, V, 498–506.

3 See Grosart's ed. of Marvell.

efforts. The ode celebrating the nativity, which from its theme always partook of the pastoral nature, was to be sure, no new thing; and Herrick, with others before him, had applied the pastoral to occasional verse.' Marvell's poems are different, and while didactic in intent, are yet distinctly artistic. Such poems are Clorinda and Damon, and A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda."

There remains one great name, that of Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, whose secular verse, published as early as 1646, was succeeded by long years of religious study and contemplation, and the production of many books in verse and prose, all devotional in cast. Vaughan knew Randolph and Cartwright and venerated the memory of Jonson, who died when Vaughan was a youth at Oxford; under this influence he translated Juvenal and wrote some erotic poetry not above that of Randolph or Stanley. From the little we know of his life, it seems that Vaughan, like Herbert, had been of the world in his younger days, and that the chastening hand of adversity had fallen heavily upon him and led him away from earthly themes to the contemplative and devout life of a recluse. Without violence to the probable facts, we may conceive of Vaughan in his beautiful home in South Wales as we think of Wordsworth in later times in his beloved Lake Country, a lover of woods and hills and the life that makes them melodious, but a lover of them not merely for their beauty, but for the divine message which they bear to man, their revelation and ethical import. Vaughan's nature, like that of Wordsworth, is alike expansive and narrow. The expansiveness of the two poets is not unlike, and consists in a large-souled interpretation of the goodness of God

1 Cf. A Pastoral upon the Birth of Prince Charles, ed. Hale, p. 35. 2 Ed. Aitken, 1892, pp. 41 and 77; and below, pp. 152 and 154. 3 Grosart has collected the secular and devotional poetry of Vaughan in four volumes, 1868-1870.