journey from Rome in the summer of 1650, the poet contracted a fever which quickly broke his constitution: only a few weeks did he linger before the altar—then the church which was to have been his sanctuary became his tomb:
How well, blest swan, did fate contrive thy death;
And make thee render up thy tuneful breath
In thy great Mistress' arms, thou most divine
And richest offering of Loretto's shrine!
So sang Abraham Cowley of his friend—"poet and saint, O hard and rarest union that can be!"
Born in earlier ages, Crashaw might be pictured as going to martyrdom with a smile and a hymn of praise upon his lips: or, in the quiet of a monastic cell he might have worked lovingly upon those heavenly verses—a poetic Fra Angelico. But the thundering questions of Cromwell's day woke little echo in his nature. All about him men were demanding if king or parliament should rule England; he cared little, providing the Counsels of Perfection ruled his own life, and dreamed on while others fought. Crashaw was not, perhaps, a leader of men; but he was most indubitably a follower of God. And he could act as well as dream when the crisis came—he could and did act with such an uncompromising fidelity to truth and to his own ideals that the old world's story is brighter for his record.
With estimates of Richard Crashaw it is customary to couple the name of George Herbert; a comparison which was begun by that editor of 1646, and has persisted since. Superficially it seems reasonable: their writings were almost contemporaneous; they were said to be of the same "school"; both were sincerely religious; their very titles, The Temple and Steps to the Temple, imply more than an accidental propin-
