last fibre,—quite, in fact, in the spirit of Richard Crashaw's poem on "The Weeper:"—
"What bright soft thing is this?
Sweet Mary, thy fair eyes' expence?
A moist spark it is,
A watery diamond; from whence
The very term, I think, was found,
The water of a diamond.
"O 'tis not a tear,
'Tis a star about to drop
From thine eye its sphere;
The sun will stoop and take it up,
Proud will his sister be to wear
This thine eye's jewel in her ear.
"O 'tis a tear,
Too true a tear! for no sad eyne,
How sad so e'er,
Rain so true a tear as thine;
Each drop leaving a place so dear
Weeps for itself, is its own tear.
"Such a pearl as this is
(Slipt from Aurora's dewy breast)
The rose-bud's sweet lip kisses,
And such the rose itself when vext
With ungentle flames, does shed,
Sweating in too warm a bed."
This is meant reverently, but what shall we say of Mr. Rossetti's "Love's Redemption," in which the act of sexual connection is outrageously and vilely compared to the administering of the sacramental bread and wine?—
"O thou, who at Love's hour ecstatically," &c.[1]
Compare, also, with Mr. Rossetti's pseudo-religious poems generally, those passages of Crashaw in which all the language of passion and lust is used to describe purely spiritual and religious sensations:—
- ↑ See ante, p. 59.
