as 1620, Archbishop Usher preached the funeral sermon over William Crashaw's second wife, praising her, one is happy to read, for "her sin-gular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor." Of the subsequent life in this austere Puritan home few details have come down; we know that Richard was educated at the Charter-house on the nomination of two nobles, friends of his father; and that the latter died in 1626. But for the most part his boyhood is a blank.
It is at Cambridge University, where Crashaw entered in 1631, that the first clear light is thrown upon his life. The loneliness of his youth was over at last; and here, in the more friendly High Church atmosphere, among friends and tutors alike congenial, the poet's nature blossomed out like a flower in the sunshine. The death of two fellow-students called from him a number of graceful laments, and he contributed several occasional poems in Latin to the University collections—a significant but scarcely phenomenal achievement for the undergraduate of those days.
In 1634, probably his twenty-first or twenty-second year, something more notable occurred: the University Press published (anonymously) his remarkable Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, containing nearly two hundred Latin epigrams, including the oft-quoted and ever-memorable one upon the miracle at Cana:
Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubit;
It was probably in early youth, also, that Crashaw composed those charming "Wishes to his (supposed) Mistress":
Who e'er she be,
That not impossible she
That shall command my heart and me;
