Amazing as is the fecundity of Nature—which sets an orchid beckoning to us from the dry bark of a fallen tree, or the delicate edelweiss amid the silent Alpine summits—History has equal phenomena. For History, too, has blossomed "in purple and red" down many a stony highway, up many a forgotten and thorn-choked by-path. One of these gracious miracles has been the persistence of the Catholic note in English poetry, with all the powers of this world uniting to drown and silence it. One can scarcely conjure up a less promising soil for things Catholic than England of the late sixteenth and middle seventeenth centuries; yet it is a sober fact that the most intensely religious poets of both these eras were of the Old Faith. The latter part of Elizabeth's reign was so barren in devotional poetry that the palm goes quite unhesitatingly to the martyred Robert Southwell; and his successor's claim, although on more disputed ground, is not less assured.
For Richard Crashaw, if, possibly, less of an apostle than Father Southwell, was even more of a poet—so deeply and transcendently a poet that, in his own field, he need fear comparison with no English lyrist, save perhaps only one, before or since. Yet from a strange and troublous background his picture stands out. On one side was the Established Church; recognised as so much the bulwark of conservative English policies that Charles I. rose up, when about to receive the sacrament from Archbishop Usher, to declare publicly
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