It shines; and with a sovereign ray
Beates bright upon the burning faces
Of soules which in that Name's sweet graces
Find everlasting smiles.
For full two hundred years after Crashaw there was no English poet at all comparable to him in this rapturous beauty of religious singing. Even now, the tale of his successors is quickly told—Dante Rossetti in exquisite moments, Patmore in odes, Lionel Johnson in a few wistful pages, and, finally, Francis Thompson; for it is a strain fugitive and homesick in our modern world. But to be, in Richard Crashaw's understanding, was to make melody:
Wake, in the name
Of Him who never sleeps, all things that are,
Or, what's the same,
Are musicall.
And like the Assisian, he included all creatures in this universal harmony, the little things and weak as well as the mighty.
Nor yields the noblest nest
Of warbling seraphim to the eares of Love
A choicer lesson than the joyfull breast
Of a poor panting turtle-dove,
declares his hymn "To the Name Above Every Name."
Crashaw's secular lyrics, while less distinctively characteristic, might very well have made the reputation of another man. Whether one considers the dainty love-lines of his "Wishes," the tender simplicity of his "Epitaph on a Newly Married Couple," or the gaiety of "Cupid's Cryer" and "Love's Horoscope," one is certain
