to find cause for delighted appreciation. Yet probably the brightest gem of them all is "Musick's Duel": truly "fraught with a fury so harmonious" that it leaves poet and reader gasping at its close. Nothing was ever so charming and reassuring as to watch a saint at play—and in these poems the holy mystic does play delectably; nay, the artist rejoices as a strong man to run his race. By them, one knows that Crashaw was not a one-sided genius, but liberal in his love and sympathies.
If it should be necessary to characterise Crashaw's work by three epithets, the manifest points would seem to be his spirituality, his ingenuity, and his sensuous emotion. In the last two exercises he has, haply, fallen into excess, and, most of all, in his religious poems. He is prone to "invoke Sweetness by all her names," and for all the world
Like a soft lump of incense, hasted
By too hot a fire, and wasted
Into perfuming clouds,
rise his breathless raptures. One turns giddy trying to follow him: or else, standing judicially aside, one declares the infatuated poet to have been giddy himself.
This is the persistent reproach of "The Weeper," in many ways a great and touching poem, yet subject to the ridicule and criticism even of those who love Crashaw best. "Mea culpa—mea maxima culpa," one seems to see him smiling down to us, from his high eternal place. Yet, if his earthly metaphors were occasionally strained, they were almost infallibly beautiful and quite infallibly telling. In fact, they were at moments too telling for our sober taste. So also with his extreme sensibility. It is rather un-
