Crashaw's passionate outbursts, with their flaming brilliancy, and
their quick-moving lines, are hard to parallel in the language, and
verse,
6
## p.
their quick-moving lines, are hard to parallel in the language, and
verse,
6
## p.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
In their development of
the religious lyric, which was admirably adapted to the portrayal
of subtle emotions, they achieved a modest success, while greater
poets triumphed in the ampler fields of allegory and epic.
The fascination of George Herbert is due as much to his
character as to his writings. It is true that the reputation of
The Temple was assured, and nine editions called for, before Izaak
Walton's Life made Herbert one of the most familiar figures of
the century. But The Temple, and its prose companion, The A
Priest to the Temple (1652), had already revealed the presence of
conflicting traits in their author's character, as, with a rare and
almost morbid sensitiveness, he watched his own growth and
scrutinised his moods. His personal history, therefore, is of
more than ordinary moment for understanding his poems.
The famous Border family of the Herberts had furnished a
long line of soldiers, courtiers, judges and men of affairsman
ancestry such as lord Herbert of Cherbury delighted to tell of
with a pleasing vanity. The persuasion to a more peaceful
calling reached George Herbert, not through his father's line, but
## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################
George Herbert
27
a
through his mother, Magdalen, daughter of Sir Richard Newport
of High Ercall, Shropshire. Her husband died in 1596, leaving her
with a family of seven sons and three daughters, 'Job's number
and Job's distribution as she herself would very often remember. '
George, the fifth son, was born at Montgomery on 3 April 1593, in
the same year as Walton his biographer, and Nicholas Ferrar
who stood sponsor to The Temple. Magdalen Herbert had all her
sons brought up in learning,' but most of them chose the life of
the court or the camp. It was natural to a Herbert to 'chase
brave employments with a naked sword throughout the world,' and
not even George escaped the passion and choler' of his race.
At Westminster school, under Richard Ireland, he laid the
foundation of his scholarship. His boyish performance in answer
to the veteran Andrew Melville's Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria may
be lightly dismissed as deserving neither praise nor blame; an
injudicious admirer printed it thirty years after Herbert's death.
Of greater importance are the two sonnets which he sent to his
mother as a New Year's gift, soon after his becoming a scholar of
Trinity college, Cambridge. “Doth poetry wear Venus' livery, only
serve her turn? ' he asks,
Cannot Thy love
Heighten & spirit to sound out Thy praise
As well as any she?
In this sixteen-year-old challenge to the love poetry of the day, he
probably reveals the influence of John Donne, who was already
his mother's friend, and had written many of his Divine Poems,
though they first appeared in print in the same year as The
Temple. If Herbert's early ambition to become a sacred poet never
faded from his mind, it hardly held its own during the next fifteen
years with academic ambitions of scholarship, and civic ambitions
of state employment. Even on the death of his mother in 1627,
Parentalia, the filial odes which he appended to Donne's funeral
sermon, did not include any English poems, and deserved Barnabas
Oley's comment, 'he made his ink with water of Helicon. ' His
rapid success in the university raised higher hopes. Fellow of
Trinity in 1616, and praelector of rhetoric in 1618, he aspired to
the office of public orator, 'the finest place in the University,'
as he called it, especially because it brought the orator into
relations with the court. The retiring orator, Sir Francis
Nethersole, and his predecessor, Sir Robert Naunton, held im-
portant political offices. Herbert's high connections, courtly
address and knowledge of languages were likely to win him similar
## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################
28
The Sacred Poets
promotion. He had made no secret of his intention ultimately to
seek the priesthood, and now brushed aside Nethersole's warning
that the orator's office might divert him too much from divinity.
He canvassed friends and kinsfolk for their support, and sought
to 'work the Heads to my purpose. He was installed orator on
18 January 1619, and held the post till his mother's death. As
the official mouth-piece of the university, he was expected to use
the language of flattery in addressing those whom Cambridge
delighted to honour, and he was well qualified to 'trade in cour-
tesies and wit’; but, even in an age of adulation, his hyperboles
are conspicuous. It is impossible to acquit him of self-seeking in
his use of the orator's opportunities. As Walton honestly says,
'he enjoyed his gentile humour for cloaths, and courtlike company,
and seldom look'd towards Cambridge, unless the King were there,
and then he never failed. ' According to the same witness, 'all
Mr Herbert's Court hopes' died with the death in rapid succession
of his two most influential friends, and of the king himself in 1625.
It is difficult to believe that his chances were all gone for a man
of his parts, but the sudden check served to bring once more to
the fore that alternative career which he had never put wholly
from him. Retiring 'to a friend in Kent, where he lived very
privately,' he debated with himself whether he should return to
'the painted pleasures of a Court life,' or take orders. Some part
of his hesitancy must have been overcome very soon, for he was
already a deacon", when he was instituted by proxy, on 5 July
1626, to the prebend of Leighton Ecclesia in Lincoln cathedral.
How far his entering the diaconate committed him to clerical life
cannot easily be gauged. It was one thing to qualify for honorary
preferments, it was another to throw in his lot unreservedly with
'a despised order' and its professional duties. The parallel case
of his friend Ferrar, ordained deacon in this same summer, may
throw some light upon the contemporary opinion of the diaconate.
Highly as Ferrar regarded it, he protested that 'he durst not
advance one step higher,' and clearly shared that growing
regard for the priesthood which the school of Andrewes had
encouraged. The point is important, because it indicates that
the period of conflict for Herbert was not over, and its long
continuance wrung from him poems which bear the marks of
mental suffering. The poems of this period have also many refer-
ences to his agues and failing health. Life was slipping from
? This fact has been generally overlooked or denied, but the evidence of the Lincoln
chapter acts is cited in Daniell's Life, p. 103.
## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################
The Temple
29
him, with nothing achieved, when his marriage to Jane Danvers,
in 1629, brought a happier state of mind and greater willingness
to adopt clerical life. In 1630, Philip, earl of Pembroke, asked
king Charles, in whose gift the living was for that turn, to give
Bemerton to his kinsman, and, on 26 April, Herbert was instituted
to the rectory of Fulston St Peter's with Bemerton, Wiltshire;
on 19 September he was ordained priest. The three years at
Bemerton, ending with his burial ‘in his own church under the
altar' on 3 March 1633, form that part of Walton's Life, and of
the common tradition about Herbert, which needs least correction.
‘Holy Mr Herbert' is no idealised picture of a biographer who
saw him but once; it is the estimate of his contemporaries, of
Ferrar and Oley, and of lord Herbert, who wrote that his life was
most holy and exemplary; in so much that about Salisbury, where
he lived, beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted. '
The intensity of the long struggle with himself, which had its
echoes even in Bemerton days, saves his life and writings from
anything like tameness, though there was peace at the last. The
personal note in The Temple is an unfailing interest. Herbert himself
gave the best description of his unpublished book, when, from his
deathbed, he sent it to his 'dear brother Ferrar,' with the message
that he would 'find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts
that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject
mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now
found perfect freedom. ' It is this history of a soul which gives
unity to The Temple, and makes it a book, in a sense in which
Steps to the Temple is only a collection,
Herbert was a conscientious worker, continually polishing
and resetting his poems. This fact has become clearer since
Grosart brought to notice the manuscript, including not quite
half of The Temple, which had lain, unused by previous editors, in
the Williams library. The extensive differences between the
Williams MS and the 1633 edition show that, in revision, Herbert
struck out too fantastic conceits, smoothed away roughnesses
and replaced unsatisfactory poems by others on the same themes.
It remained for a later editor, George Herbert Palmer of Harvard,
to turn the Williams MS to yet greater profit, by using it as
a basis for distinguishing between Herbert's earlier and later
work. Palmer's order, at some points, is arbitrary and uncon-
vincing ; but no greater service has been done towards under-
standing Herbert than by this attempt to arrange his poems
chronologically. Herbert's growth in artistic mastery, as well
## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################
30
The Sacred Poets
as in depth of character, is made abundantly clear by this
treatment
In metre, Herbert never goes far afield. He makes no
experiments with lines of three-syllabled feet, and even the
trochaic measure is seldom used instead of iambic. But, in
minor arrangements, as to the length of the lines, the incidence
of the rimes and the number of lines to the stanza, Herbert is
always looking out to find what will suit each particular poem.
Palmer reckons that, of the 169 poems which comprise The
Temple, ‘116 are written in metres which are not repeated. '
The variations run within a narrow circle, but, at least, they
show the poet's interest in experiments of form. In Aaron, the
same sequence of five rimes throughout the five verses is used
with consummate success, giving the effect of 'one set slow bell. '
The whole framework, in all its parts, is fashioned exactly to
fit the thought of the poem; it is artifice throughout, and yet,
within its limits, a masterpiece of art. His constructive ability
is one of his best artistic gifts. The Quip is a poem of perfect
length, its parts are well knit with a refrain and other correspond-
ences of phrase and it works to a well-turned close. The same
neatness of construction marks a dozen other short poems, like
The Pulley, Justice, Decay and the two poems oddly called
Jordan. He has an instinct for a good ending; not infrequently
there is a surprise in store, as in The Collar, where the re-
bellious mood collapses at the Master's voice, or in the first
sonnet on Prayer, where a string of definitions, both felicitous
and preposterous, leads up to the simplest possible description of
prayer as 'something understood. ' He has also a pretty turn for
personification, which puts life into reflective poems like The
Quip, Avarice and The Collar. To see how it gives animation
to his work, one has only to compare Herbert's Decay with
Vaughan's imitation, Corruption.
Herbert's ingenuity, at times, misleads him into what can only
be called tricks, like the representation of the echo in Heaven, or
the intentional failure of the rime at the close of Home. The
verses shaped like an altar and the Easter wings came under
Addison's condemnation as 'false wit. ' They would find no
parallel to-day except in Alice in Wonderland, but many of
Herbert's fellow poets—Drummond and Wither and Quarles-
took pleasure in such devices, as well as in anagrams and acrostics.
The number of Herbert's poems affected by this fashion is very
small; but it has most unjustly told against him with his critics.
## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################
Herbert's Conceits
31
6
A more serious defect of taste he shares with the poets whom
Johnson styled 'metaphysical. ' The fantastic conceits which fashion
approved in secular poetry are drawn into the service of Christian
piety; as Chudleigh wrote of Donne's use of wit in his Divine
Poems:
He did not banish, but transplanted it.
There is more regard for the quaintness and unexpectedness of a
simile than for its beauty or fitness. Johnson's criticism is at least
sometimes justified in Herbert's case, that “the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together. ' Things great and small are
grouped in incongruous, and even unpleasant, association. It was
an article of Herbert's creed that nothing can be so mean' but
that it can be ennobled to bright and clean uses, and he was
justified in his use of illustrations from common life, folk-lore and
the medicinal and chemical knowledge which had great fascination
for seventeenth century writers. The candle's snuff, the bias
of the bowls, the tuning of an instrument, a blunted knife and cold
hands that are angrie with the fire,' are successful and popular
elucidations of his thought. But the perils of falling into prosiness
or bathos beset his path. The fine theme in Providence that man
is the world's high priest' cannot recover its dignity after such a
playful extravagance as this:
Most things move th' underjaw; the Crocodile not.
Most things sleep lying; th' Elephant loans or stands.
The Psalmist is responsible for the saying, 'put Thou my tears
into Thy bottle,' but Herbert must add, 'As we have boxes for
the poor. ' Far worse than mere absurdity or prosiness is the
intolerable conceit which ends The Dawning, where the 'sad
heart' is bidden to dry his tears in Christ's burial-linen. Such
instances, though they are rare in Herbert, compare with Crashaw's
excesses in The Weeper. Both poets, too, draw from the senses of
smell and taste images which make a modern reader, rightly or
wrongly, ill at ease. "This broth of smells, that feeds and fats my
minde,' in The Odour, is nearly as unpleasing as Crashaw's 'brisk
cherub,' that sips of the Magdalene's tears, till
9
>
>
his song
Tasts of this Breakfast all day long.
But, despite these temptations to over-daring and tasteless conceits,
Herbert got more good than harm from the metaphysical fashion.
His interest in thought and in recondite illustration saves him from
being thin or facile. He far more often errs by trying to pack too
much into small compass, or by being too ingenious, than by working
## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################
32
The Sacred Poets
a single thought threadbare, as his successors and imitators often do.
A fine instance of his power of concentrated thought is his poem
Man. And if he is sometimes too artificial, there is no lack of
emotional quality in Herbert at his best. There are poems in
many different keys like Throw away thy rod, Antiphon and The
Collar, which are all tremulous with feeling.
It remains to notice The Church Porch, in which Herbert
meets the young gallant on his own ground, and avoids the higher
arguments that belong to The Church. The well-bred, well-in-
formed man of the world, who knows the ways of learning,
honour, pleasure,' gives his good-tempered counsels with many
a shrewd hit, but without malice. The collector of Outlandish
Proverbs is the right man to coin these terse maxims of mother-
wit. There is no English book of wisdom which holds its own so
well; it is kept from cynicism by its humour, and from going out
of date by its writer's knowledge of the world.
The anonymous preface to Crashaw's Steps to the Temple
(1646) introduces the author with the words, 'Here's Herbert's
second, but equall. ' In the same volume, Crashaw pays a tribute
to his predecessor in the lines which he sent to a gentlewoman
with a copy of The Temple :
Know you faire on what you look;
Divinest love lyes in this booke.
But there is hardly a poem by Crashaw which recalls Herbert,
and the two men are widely different in temperament and
genius. Crashaw's debt to the older poet is not so much technical
as spiritual. The memory of Herbert's self-consecration was still
fresh at Cambridge, when The Temple was issued from a Cambridge
a
press in Crashaw's second year at Pembroke, and that memory
was specially treasured by Crashaw's friends at Little Gidding?
Richard Crashaw was born in 1612 or 1613? He never knew
his mother; his step-mother was commended by Ussher for ‘her
singular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor,' but
she, too, passed quickly out of his life. His father, William
Crashaw, was a noted preacher, who spent his substance in buying
books and publishing his own contributions to the Roman contro-
1 Crashaw contributed to Ferrar and Herbert's Hygiasticon, 1634.
2 1612 is preferable to 1613. His father states in The Honour of Vertue (1620), that
Ussher had preached at Richard's baptism eight years afore. ' His age at the time of
his election to Pembroke on 6 July 1631 is given as 18, which, if it simply implies his
age at his last birthday, would, also, allow of the date 1612.
## p. 33 (#49) ##############################################
Crashaw at Cambridge 33
versy. The contrast between the father's anti-papal vehemence
and the son's ardent Catholicism has often suggested that Richard's
change of religion was a reaction from his father's teaching. But,
apart from the fact that Richard was only fourteen when his father
died, there must also be noticed another strain in the writings
and character of the elder Crashaw. The violent contro-
versialist of The Jesuittes Gospel concerns us less than the
mystically-minded editor of A Manuall for true Catholickes.
In the Manuall (1611), William Crashaw thought fit to gather,
out of the most misty times of Popery,' many ancient de-
votions for the sick and the dying, such as the eloquent ‘Go
forth, o Christian soule. ' The man who could see the beauty of
these prayers through the mists of prejudice, and, in spite of
violent disagreement with their doctrines, could translate a
Jesuit's hymns to the Virgin, has some share in the authorship
of the hymns to St Teresa and the Magdalene.
From Charterhouse, Richard Crashaw was elected to a scholar-
ship at Pembroke hall, Cambridge, on 6 July 1631, and, in the
following autumn, he commemorated the death of a fellow of his
college, William Herrys, in a sheaf of elegies, Latin and English,
The English poems, especially the second, Death, what dost? o hold
thy Blow, show the influence of Jonson, though there is already
revealed something of the high colour and passionate note which
distinguish Crashaw's later work. In the earlier years of his
academic life, as was natural, he gave more attention to Latin
than to English verse, and, in the year of taking his first degree,
he published Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, with dedicatory
odes to his school and college preceptors. One of the odes, in
praise of his tutor, John Tournay, who had recently incurred
the vice-chancellor's censure for maintaining the insufficiency of
faith alone, shows that Crashaw was passing under high church
influences. This sympathy is still more noticeable in the lines
On a Treatise of Charity, which were prefixed to the Discourses,
put forth in the following year by Robert Shelford, of Ringsfield
in Suffolk, Priest,' a book denounced by Ussher as 'rotten stuff. ”
After an eloquent defence of the relation of art to religion,
Crashaw ends with ten vigorous lines which were omitted from all
subsequent issues of his poems. He attacks 'the zealous ones'
who make it 'a point of Faith' to call the pope 'Anti-Christ';
‘;
What e're it be,
I'm sure it is no point of Charitie.
Crashaw's election to a fellowship at Peterhouse, on 20 November
0
>
E. L. VIL
CU, II.
3
## p. 34 (#50) ##############################################
34
The Sacred Poets
1636', caused him to make his home there for the greater part of
the next eight years. There was much that was congenial to him
in that society; another poet, Joseph Beaumont, was elected in
the same year, and Crashaw's Latin poems show his interest in
Cosin's schemes for the decoration of the new chapel. Of his
Cambridge life and interests, little can be gathered except from
his poems and from the anonymous editor's preface to Steps to the
Temple. This preface is not wholly trustworthy evidence*; but
there is no reason to doubt its witness to Crashaw's living a
recluse and ascetic life, and imitating the nightly vigils of the
Gidding community. As he afterwards told his friend, Thomas
Carre, he was known in Cambridge days as 'the chaplaine of the
Virgine myld. ' His indifference about food and drink is noted by
both his editors; Carre calls him 'a very bird of paradice' for his
unworldliness. For vacant hours, he had other pursuits besides
poetry, but all of them artistic. His skill in 'drawing, limning,
graving' is exemplified in the designs which he prepared for
Carmen Deo Nostro.
Already, his ardent temperament gave a warmth to his devo-
tional writing such as has been rarely seen in any English writer.
The canonisation of St Teresa in 1622 produced much literature
about her, and a wide circulation of her books. When the author
was yet among the protestantes,' as he shows in An Apologie, her
writings moved him to impassioned utterance :
Thine own dear bookes are guilty. For from thence
I learn't to know that love is eloquence.
He was conscious that Englishmen would regard his interest in
the Spanish mystic as requiring excuse, but he boldly claims
Teresa for his 'soul's countryman':
O'tis not Spanish, but 'tis hear'n she speaks.
Crashaw's knowledge of Spanish and Italian affected both the
matter and the manner of his poetry. Not only did it bring the
writings of the Spanish mystics within his reach, but, also, it
infected him with the hyperboles and luscious sweetness of the
Neapolitan poet, Marino.
1 Grosart, vol. I, p. xxxi, gives the Latin document of his admission as fellow, but
understands it as referring only to his joining the college, and assigns his fellowship
to 1637, after a year's residence at Peterhouse. Other writers have followed Grosart.
* It can bardly be written by a Cambridge man, because of the evident confusion
between “St Maries Church neere St Peters Colledge,' where the poet is said to have
lodged under Tertullian's roofe of angels,' and the new chapel of the college with its
famous angel roof which the parliamentary agent, William Dowsing, destroyed in
December 1643. See Walker, T. A. , Peterhouse, pp. 109, 110.
a
6
## p. 35 (#51) ##############################################
Crashaw's Later Years
35
6
Whether the panegyrist of St Teresa could have remained
content with Laud's 'Beauty of Holiness' is doubtful; but the
destructive violence of the parliamentary commissioners and the
downfall of church and king at Naseby must have made him
despair of the Anglican church. On his being deprived of his
fellowship on 8 April 1644, or, perhaps, without waiting for this
misfortune, he seems to have gone to Oxford, and cannot be traced
again till Cowley found him, in 1646, in Paris. By this time, he had
become a Roman Catholic, and the authour's friend' in the preface
a
to Steps to the Temple, which was published in this year, speaks of
him as 'now dead to us. ' Crashaw cannot be charged with self-
seeking in changing his creed, for he was in sore straits when
his brother-poet brought him to the notice of Henrietta Maria,
who was then in Paris. With letters of introduction from the
queen, and with pecuniary help from others, including, probably,
the countess of Denbigh, whose 'goodnes and charity' he acknow-
ledges on the title-page of his next volume, Crashaw set out for
Rome. There he became secretary to cardinal Palotta, governor
of Rome. An English traveller, John Bargrave, who had been
ejected with Crashaw from Peterhouse, describes Palotta as
papable and esteemed worthy by all. ' The same writer gives
the last scanty notice of the poet. His delicate conscience was
distressed by the laxity of the cardinal's household, and he
denounced them to his master, a man of stern morals. Palotta
recognised that Rome was no longer a safe place for Crashaw
after this exposure, and at once procured him a minor office in the
church of our Lady of Loretto, of which he was patron. He was
instituted on 24 April 1649, and, by the following August, another
had his office, Crashaw having died of a fever, which, perhaps,
he had contracted on the journey. There he was buried, the
‘richest offering of Loretto's shrine. ' Cowley's elegy on the ‘Poet
and Saint' remains Crashaw's best monument, and is a fit tribute
from him whom the elder poet acclaimed, on the strength of his
Poeticall Blossomes, as 'young master of the world's maturitie. '
Crashaw's posthumous volume, Carmen Deo Nostro (1652), which
contained almost all that was good in the earlier volumes with
many valuable additions, had a sympathetic editor, Thomas Carre,
'confessor to the English nuns at Paris,' but the French printers
made sorry work with the English words.
a
1 Not 11 June, as Grosart and others after him. Seo Walker, T. A. , Peterhouse,
p. 108.
See D. of N. B, for his real name, Miles Pinkney.
3_2
## p. 36 (#52) ##############################################
36
The Sacred Poets
Crasbaw sought his earliest inspiration in foreign models
rather than in his English predecessors. A curiously high pro-
portion of his work, both early and late, consists of translations.
Prominence was given in the volume of 1646 to his translation of
the first canto of Marino's Strage degli Innocenti. The poem
was congenial to the translator, in whose hands it grew even
more ornate than the original. A copious use of epithets,
which are generally felicitous, a free use of alliteration and
an ecstatic emphasis are already characteristic of his style.
The eighteenth century, peculiarly disqualified from appreciating
Crashaw's religious enthusiasm, retained an interest for Sospetto,
mainly because of its connection with Milton. Pride of place
was given in The Delights of the Muses to a translation of a
Jesuit schoolmaster's rhetorical exercise, on which Ford also
employed his skill in The Lovers Melancholy. The nightingale's
song has never had such lavish delineation as in Musicks duell;
but the poem is too ingenious and sophisticated to give the
atmosphere of the country. There is far more charm in the dainty
song from the Italian, To thy Lover, Deere, discover, and in Come
and let us live my Deare, from Catullus. Translations of Latin
hymns occupy a large space, especially in his last volume. They
have great merit, but seldom the particular merit of the originals.
Thus, his Dies Irae has many beauties and fine touches, but it
fails to represent the masculine strength of the Latin. Even
Vexilla Regis cannot escape his favourite phrase, a 'full nest
of loves. ' His warm, sensuous imagination kindles with his
subject, and he passes only too easily into 'a sweet inebriated
ecstasy. '
Crashaw did better work when he relied upon himself, as in
Loves Horoscope and Wishes. To his (supposed) Mistresse. It is
only this last-named example which makes one's faith waver in
Crashaw's own judgment that his secular was inferior to his sacred
The airy metre of Wishes, with its lengthening lines, is
exactly fitted to its graceful humour. But, delicate as this poem is,
it cannot sustain a comparison with his Hymne to St Teresa. The
one is intense with passion, the other is playful and superficial.
"The very outgoings of the soule’are in the divine poems; there is
grace and dainty trifling, but no more, in the love poems. Nowhere
in the secular poems do we find the elan, the surrender to an
inspiration, the uprush of feeling which carries all before it.
Crashaw's passionate outbursts, with their flaming brilliancy, and
their quick-moving lines, are hard to parallel in the language, and
verse,
6
## p. 37 (#53) ##############################################
Crashaw's Qualities
37
it is his ardent religious emotion which sets them on fire. He may
borrow too freely, for some tastes, from the language of amorous
poetry; but it was natural to him to call St Teresa ‘my rosy love'
or the Virgin a 'rosy princess,' and he serves them with a noble
chivalrous devotion.
There are as serious faults in his sacred, as in his secular, poems.
Indeed, the faults are more apparent, because they occur in a
finer setting. Crashaw's failures are peculiarly exasperating,
because they spoil work which had greater potentialities than
that of many poets who have maintained a better level. There
are inspired moments, when he outdistances all his rivals, as in
the lines which he added to his first version of The Flaming
Heart, or in the fuller version of the poem To the Countess of
Denbigh Vaughan may disappoint by long stretches of flatness,
but Crashaw more often gives positive offence by an outrageous
conceit, by gaudy colour, by cloying sweetness or by straining
of an idea which has been squeezed dry. His defective powers
of self-criticism make Crashaw the most unequal of our poets.
The Weeper contains some of his best and some of his worst
lines That he had no sureness of touch in reviewing his own
work, becomes clear when it is noticed that many of the verses
in The Weeper which have alienated his readers were either
additions to the original version, or disastrously misplaced. In
the revised form, a verse which few can read without distaste
is followed by these perfect lines :
Not in the evening's eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dyes,
Sitts sorrow with a face so fair;
No where but here did over meet
Sweetnesse so sad, sadnesse so sweet.
Within a few months of Crashaw's death, the first part of Silex
Scintillans had appeared (1650). Henry Vaughan, the elder of
twins, was born on 17 April 1621, at Newton St Bridget on the
Usk, in the parish of Llansantffread near Brecon. His chosen name,
Silurist, expresses his intimate love of the Welsh mountains and
valleys, with their rocks and streams, woodlands and solitary
places, among which he spent his childhood and all the years of
his professional life. Both he and his twin brother Thomas ex-
press their debt to Matthew Herbert, rector of Llangattock,
who schooled them for six years, before they went up to Jesus
.
I see
care
## p. 38 (#54) ##############################################
38
The Sacred Poets
college, Oxford, in 1638? He acquired sufficient Latinity to find
his chief reading, outside his professional studies and contemporary
poetry, in the fathers of the church. He left Oxford for London,
with the idea of studying for the law, but, at some date unknown,
abandoned it for medicine. The only record of these London
days is in the slight little volume of Poems, with the tenth Satyre
of Juvenal Englished, which he printed in 1646. Except for some
feeling for nature, there is nothing that anticipates the distinctive
quality of Silex Scintillans. The love-songs to Amoret, in which
he reveals his kinship with Jonson, Donne and Habington, are
not original enough to suggest that he would ever have risen
above what half a dozen of the court poets were doing at least
as well. More interesting is the literary flavour which he tries
to give to the book, in the opening poem, with its homage to
'Great Ben' and Randolph, and in the Rhapsodis on the Globe
tavern. He would have his readers believe that he is of the
school of Ben, and seeks inspiration in churchwarden pipes and
'royal witty sack, the poet's soul. ' It may be nothing more than
a youthful pose, with its suggestion of duns and debts, full cups
and the disorderly Strand, but their author took it seriously
when, in his preface of 1654, he 'most humbly and earnestly'
begged that none would read his early poems.
Before the end of the next year (1647), Vaughan, apparently,
had settled down to the life of the country, and wrote from
'Newton by Usk'a dedication to Olor Iscanus. The book, however,
did not appear till 1651, and, even then, only under another's
auspices, the author having ‘long ago condemned these poems to
obscurity. The reason for this postponement is the crisis in
Vaughan’s life, which will be more fitly described in connection
with the issue of Silex. The poem which gave its name to Olor
Iscanus sings the praise of the Usk. It has reminiscences of
Browne's Pastorals. Denham’s Cooper's Hill had already appeared,
but its most famous lines on the Thames were not inserted till
after Vaughan's lines were written. The most remarkable, if,
also, the strangest, poem in the collection is the Donne-like
Charnel House. Its forcible epithets—shoreless thoughts, vast
tenter'd hope'-and its array of odd words and similes compel
attention in spite of its morbid cast of thought. There are not
1 Doubt has sometimes been thrown on Anthony & Wood's statement that Henry
spent two years or more in logicals under a noted tutor' at Oxford; but it is confirmed
by Vaughan's letter to Aubrey (Wood's constant source of information), in which he says
that he stayed not at Oxford to take any degree. ' Aubrey's Brief Lives, vol. II, p. 269.
## p. 39 (#55) ##############################################
Vaughan's Secular Poems
39
6
any love poems, but many memorials of friendship, which had
ever a large place in Vaughan's thoughts. The bulk of the work
clearly belongs to the period before Silex was written, and re-
flects the atmosphere of the 1646 volume, with its allusions to
debts and gay living, and its complimentary verses upon secular
writers, D'Avenant, John Fletcher, 'the ever-memorable Mr
William Cartwright' and 'the matchless Orinda. ' The poems
about his friends who took part in the civil war suggest, but do
not clearly settle, the question whether the poet himself took any
active part. There are passages where he takes satisfaction in
the thought that his hands are clean of 'innocent blood. ' On
the other hand, he alludes to a time when this juggling fate of
soldiery first seiz'd me,' and also seems to write as an eyewitness
of the battle of Rowton heath? There are more signs of his hatred
of existing authority than of any active enthusiasm for the royal
cause, except that the poem to Thomas Powell, his ‘loyal fellow-
prisoner,' and a prayer in adversity, in The Mount of Olives, seem
to imply that, then or later, he suffered in property and person.
The poem that affords the greatest chronological difficulty is
called "To his retired friend, an Invitation to Brecknock. ' The
words, ‘since Charles, his reign,' seem to demand a date after the
king's execution, but it is difficult to reconcile its flippant, reckless
tone with the consistently serious temper of Silex, which was
published in 1650. Perhaps the poet counted Charles's reign as
over with the crushing defeat of 1645, and so the poem may be
contemporary with others of its kind and not with the poems of
Silex. One of the few poems which are certainly late, the epitaph.
on the little lady Elizabeth, who died of grief at Carisbrooke in
September 1650, is a worthy companion of Vaughan's best work.
The turning point in Vaughan's spiritual and literary history
occurs somewhere in the period preceding the publication of the
first part of Silex Scintillans (1650). There are many indications
in this volume, and in the preface which he wrote in 1654 for the
second part (1655), that he underwent a prolonged and painful
sickness, which nearly cost him his life. Even in 1654, he believes
himself to be 'at no great distance from death,' though he hopes
that he is spared to make amends for a misspent youth. In
language that appears excessive, at any rate in view of any.
thing that he published, he deplores his share in the 'foul and
overflowing stream' of corrupting literature, and ascribes his
1 The tempting solution, that he was present as a surgeon, must be set aside,
because his medical studies were probably not begun till later.
## p. 40 (#56) ##############################################
40
The Sacred Poets
change of view to the blessed man, Mr George Herbert, whose holy
life and verse gained many pious converts, of whom I am the least. '
The nature of Vaughan's obligations to Herbert has been the
subject of much controversy. The first and greatest debt is that
Herbert directed Vaughan's genius into the channel where only
it achieved notable and lasting success. Vaughan found himself
in Silea Scintillans; even the few successes outside that volume,
like The Eagle and the Epitaph on the lady Elizabeth, were
written after his conversion. What readers have cared to re-
member are not his poems to Amoret and Etesia, or the occasional
verse to friends and literary idols, with its jaunty tone and
petulant impatience of the time's ridiculous misery,' but the
remote, timeless, mysterious poems of Silex Scintillans. It is
credit enough to the older poet to have given his disciple
spiritual quickening and the gift of gracious feeling. But the
influence of Herbert, for better and for worse, is literary as well
as spiritual. Recent editors of Vaughan, by their extensive
collections of parallel passages, have placed it beyond dispute
that the younger writer, in his new-born enthusiasm for "holy
Herbert,' modelled himself on the author of The Temple. Many
of his poems are little more than resettings of Herbert's thought
and very words ; even the best poems, where Vaughan is most
original, have verbal reminiscences, which show how he soaked
himself in Herbert's poems. Sometimes, familiar words have
received a subtle transmutation ; sometimes, they have only
enslaved Vaughan to his disadvantage. The little tricks of
Herbert's style—the abrupt openings, the questions and ejacu-
lations, the homely words and conceits, the whimsical titles
are employed by Vaughan as his very framework. In the matter
of form, Vaughan failed to learn what Herbert had to teach.
He knows less well than Herbert when to stop, and, after
beginning with lines of such intensity as Herbert could never
have written, he is apt to lose his way and forfeit the interest
of his readers.
The real contributions of Vaughan to literature are, naturally,
those poems where he is most himself and calls no man master.
His mind and temper are essentially distinct from Herbert's.
After the change in his life, he becomes detached in mind from
the ordinary interests and ideas of his times, with which he was
in any case out of sympathy, and, as with a true mystic, his
thoughts move in a rarer, remoter air. He may dutifully follow
Herbert in celebrating the festivals of the church ; but such
## p. 41 (#57) ##############################################
Vaughan's Sacred Poems
41
concrete themes do not suit him like the more mysterious and
abstract themes of eternity, communion with the dead, nature and
childhood. The death of a younger brother occasioned a sequence
of poems in which the note of personal loss, poignant though it is,
is not more prominent than a wistful brooding over man's re-
lations with the unseen and the eternal. This theme receives
yet finer treatment in two of his best-known poems, The World
and They are all gone into the world of light. The Retreat
combines this theme with another, the innocence of childhood,
which recurs in Corruption and Childhood. In The Retreat,
which has the added interest of being the germ of Words-
worth's ode', Intimations of Immortality, Vaughan achieves a
simplicity of expression which is rare with him. Some of his
most perfect work occurs where both thought and expression
are simple, as in Peace, The Burial of an Infant, or Christ's
Nativity. More often his gift of expression is not sustained, and
the magic of the opening lines, e. g.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
soon deserts him. His workmanship becomes defective, his
rhythms halting and his expression crabbed.
Another link with Wordsworth is Vaughan's intimate and
religious feeling for nature, He has an open-air love for all
natural sights and sounds, and a subtle sympathy even with the
fallen timber or the stones at his feet. He is happier away from
the world of men, and can rejoice equally in
Dear Night! this world's defeat, the stop to busy fools,
and in the stir that heralds the dawn. It is in his observation of
nature that he achieves his most felicitous epithets—the unthrift
sun,' 'the pursy clouds' and 'purling corn. ' The setting of
these natural descriptions is usually religious, as in The Rainbow
or The Dawning ; but the lover of nature is as apparent as the
mystical thinker.
Into the space of half a dozen years, Vaughan crowded all
his best work. His prose translations and original books of
devotion belong to the same period. The Mount of Olives reveals
the occasions of many of his poems, and shows that he has been
wrongly described as a pantheist. The silence of the forty years
that he had yet to live is broken only by Thalia Rediviva (1678).
Trench elicited the interesting fact that Wordsworth owned & copy of Silex
Scintillans, at that time a rare book. Household Book of English Poetry, 2nd ed.
.
## p. 42 (#58) ##############################################
42
The Sacred Poets
For this volume, as for Olor Iscanus, the author did not make
himself responsible. Most of its contents clearly belong to
earlier days. A few poems only appear to have been written
after the restoration; for example, The True Christmas, which
;
shows Vaughan to be as little in sympathy with the laxity of the
monarchy as with the tyranny of the commonwealth. There is
an echo of his former successes in The Retirement and other
numbers of the section, which is called Pious Thoughts and
Ejaculations. The volume is also interesting because it contains
the verse-remains of his brother, 'Eugenius Philalethes,' who
died in 1666. Of Henry Vaughan, there is no further record,
except some casual allusions in the correspondence of his cousin,
John Aubrey, till the record of his tombstone in Llansantffread
churchyard, commemorating his death on 23 April 1695, at the
age of 73! His retired life was in keeping with his small fame
as a writer. He knew that his writing was 'cross to fashion,' and
only one of his books reached a second edition ; with that exception,
nothing was reprinted for nearly two hundred years. He holds
his place now, not for the mass of his work, but for a few
unforgettable lines, and for a rare vein of thought, which re-
mained almost unworked again till Wordsworth’s nature poems
and Tennyson's In Memoriam.
6
The religious and mystical literature of the seventeenth century
has been recently enriched by Bertram Dobell's discovery of
Thomas Traherne, who is specially welcome for his fresh and
interesting outlook on life. Like Herbert and Vaughan, he
came from the Welsh borders, and had his full share of Celtic
fervour. The son of a Hereford shoemaker, he entered Brasenose
college, Oxford, in 1652, and graduated in arts and divinity. He
was admitted in 16577 to the rectory of Credenhill, near Hereford,
where he remained for about ten years, until, in 1667, he was
made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, on his appointment as
lord keeper, when the Cabal ministry took office. After seven
years in this service, Traherne died in his patron's house at
Teddington, near Hampton court, and was buried on 10 October
1674, ‘in the Church there, under the reading-desk. ' According
1 According to the tombstone: but he completed 74 years six days before his death,
? If Traherne was of canonical age at the time of his institution, this may,
perhaps, indicate the year of his birth as not later than 1634, though it has been usual
to give 1636 on the assumption that he was sixteen when he matriculated in 1652.
Crashaw went to Cambridge at the age of eighteen, and a poor student like Traberne.
may well bave found difficulty in going up earlier.
了
.
## p. 43 (#59) ##############################################
Thomas Traherne
43
to Anthony à Wood, he always led a simple and devout life ;
his will shows that he possessed little beyond his books, and
thought it worth while to bequeath his 'old hat. '
In his lifetime, he published only Roman Forgeries (1673),
which might be left to slumber, except for its preface, showing
his scholarly love of the Bodleian library, 'which is the glory of
Oxford, and this nation. ' Just before his death, he sent to the
press Christian Ethics (1675), and, a quarter of a century later, the
non-juring divine, George Hickes, printed anonymously, with a
friend's account of the nameless author, A serious and patheticall
Contemplation of the Mercies of God. This latter work contained
thanksgivings for all the common blessings of life, arranged
rhythmically, much in the manner of bishop Andrewes's Devotions.
The rest of Traherne's works remained in manuscript till the
Poems were printed in 1903, and Centuries of Meditations in
1908. Another octavo volume of meditations and devotions is
still extant in manuscript.
All these works, except the controversial volume, reveal an
original mind, dominated by certain characteristic thoughts, which
are commended to the reader by a glowing rhetoric and a fine
conviction of their sufficiency. Like Vaughan, Traherne retains
an idyllic remembrance of the innocence and spiritual insight of
childhood, and insists that he ‘must become a child again. ' The
child knew nothing of 'churlish proprieties,' and rightly regarded
himself as 'heir of the whole world':
Long time before
I in my mother's womb was born,
A God preparing did this glorious store
The world for me adorn.
Into His Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.
Only with much ado' was the child taught by his elders to prize
gew-gaws above the common things of earth and sky; it was a
difficult matter to persuade me that the tinseled ware upon a
hobby-horse was a fine thing. But the lesson was successfully
taught, and now, for the man who would recover felicity, there
was no remedy left but to get free of 'the burden and cumber
of devised wants,' and to recognise again the true wealth of
earth's commonest gifts. Man could do God Himself no greater
homage than to delight in His creation:
Our blessedness to see
ls eren to the Deity
A Beatific Vision! He attains
His Ends while we enjoy. In us He reigns.
>
## p. 44 (#60) ##############################################
44
The Sacred Poets
It is a fortunate circumstance that Traherne has given parallel
expression to his leading ideas both in verse and in prose, as it
affords an opportunity of estimating which medium was the better
at his command. His mind was poetic and imaginative rather
than philosophic and logical, and yet it may be urged, with some
confidence, that he achieved more unquestionable success with his
prose than with his verse. Even the opening poems on the
thoughts of childhood, beautiful as they are, have nothing so
striking as the corresponding prose passage, which begins : The
corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from ever-
lasting to everlasting. Again, the poems on Thoughts, as being
every man’s ‘substantial treasures,' are less flowing and musical
than such lines as these :
I can visit Noah in his ark, and swim upon the waters of the deluge. I can
see Moses with his rod, and the children of Israel passing through the sea. . . .
I can visit Solomon in his glory, and go into his temple, and view the sitting
of his servants, and admire the magnificence and glory of his kingdom. No
ereature but one like unto the Holy Angels can see into all ages. . . . It is not
by going with the feet, but by journeys of the Soul, that we travel thither.
Such writing as this has some of the magical quality and personal
note of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.
As a poet, Traherne has not mastered his technique. His
poems are often diffuse and full of repetitions. He is obsessed
with the rime, 'treasures' and 'pleasures,' using it on page after
page; and, even for an age that was not careful of such things,
the proportion of defective rimes is high. The categorical habit,
also, has had disastrous effects, in unbroken strings of fifteen
nouns in one poem, thirteen adjectives in another, fourteen par-
ticiples in a third. In other poems, the didactic purpose gets the
upper hand, and we hear the preacher's voice: This, my dear
friends, this was my blessed case. ' In spite of such poems as
Wonder, News, Silence and The Ways of Wisdom, he wrote
nothing in verse that is so arresting as his rhetorical prose:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and per-
ceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because
men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
The success of Herbert's Temple inevitably produced a crop
of imitations, ranging from Christopher Harvey's Synagogue,
which, by being bound up with The Temple in many editions
from 1640 onwards, achieved a reputation beyond its deserts,
1
1
1
## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################
William Habington
45
down to the doggerel and wholesale plagiarism of Samuel
Speed's Prison Pietie (1677). Vaughan rightly complained of
these facile imitators that they cared more for verse than
perfection. ' Those of Herbert's contemporaries who attempted
sacred verse without falling under his influence deserve more
consideration. To right and to left of Herbert stand William
Habington and Francis Quarles. Both belong by birth to the
country gentry; but the former found readers only among his
own class, while the latter was more successful than any writer of
his time in gauging the protestant religious feeling of English-
men at large. Habington's associations from birth onwards were
with the Roman Catholic minority. He was born at Hindlip hall
near Worcester, a house famous for its concealment of priests,
on the very day on which the Gunpowder plot was discovered
in consequence (so tradition has said) of his mother's letter to
lord Monteagle. His father was an antiquary, whose History of
Edward IV the son completed and published in 1640. William
Habington, after being educated at St Omer and Paris with a
view to his becoming a priest, returned to England and, probably
in the early months of 1633, married Lucy Herbert, youngest
daughter of the first baron Powis. Her praises he celebrated
in Castara, which he published anonymously in 1634. The two
parts of which it then consisted contain poems of courtship and
of marriage. A new edition of Castara, a year later, revealed the
author's name, and added to the second part a set of eight elegies
on his friend, George Talbot, which would more properly have
constituted a third part, and three characters of a mistress, a
wife and a friend, introducing the three sections. In 1640, a
third edition included an entirely new third part, consisting of
a character of 'A Holy Man,' and a collection of sacred poems.
The author recognises that he may be thought ‘a Precisian' for
his unfashionable praise of chastity, but he would not win even
'the spreadingst laurell’by writing wanton or profane. ' In the
third part, he leaves the theme of earthly love to the soft silken
youths at Court,' and is full of self-accusation that he should
ever have handled the theme, however purely. There is a
sombre and monotonous strain running through this third part.
Advancing death, empty fame and decay of the tomb itself are its
constant subjects. Unlike Traherne, he hardly finds life worth
enjoying, with death awaiting him:
And should I farme the proudest state,
I'me Tennant to uncertaine fate.
There is grim humour in the description of his deathbed, where
## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################
46
The Sacred Poets
6
he seems to be a mourner at his own obsequies. He can put
no trust in the predictions of astrologer or doctor :
They onely practise how to make
A mistery of each mistake.
In most of the poems there are occasional fine lines, as in the
welcome to death as a safe retreat,
Where the leane slave, who th' Oare doth plye,
Soft as his Admirall may lye.
More sustained excellence is found in the poems Nox nocti
indicat Scientiam, Et exultavit Humiles and Cupio dissolvi.
But, in many of these meditative and frigid poems, the thought
is commonplace and uncommended by graceful expression, or
accent of sincerity. Defects of workmanship rather than of taste
mar his work; he judged himself rightly, when he admitted in
his preface that he needed to spend ‘more sweate and oyle,' if he
would aspire to the name of poet. Greater pains might have
eliminated his excessive use of the expletive 'do,' many weak
rime-endings, clumsy syntax and harsh elisions (e. g. 'th' An’chrits
prayer,' ''mid th' horrors,' 'sh' admires,' 'so 'bhors'). In the
same year as the complete Castara, appeared The Queene of
Arragon. A Tragi-Comedie. The author died in 1654 and was
buried where my forefathers ashes sleepe. ' His own modest
estimate of his verses will not be challenged, that they are not
so high, as to be wondred at, nor so low as to be contemned. '
Quarles was as little affected as was Habington by the school of
Donne. His chief literary idol was Phineas Fletcher, 'the Spenser
of this age. He was born in 1592 at his father's manor house
.
of Stewards, near Romford in Essex. After studying at Cam-
bridge and Lincoln's inn, he went abroad, like his contemporary
Ferrar, in the train of the princess Elizabeth, on her marriage
with the elector palatine. After his return to England, he seems
to have lived partly in Essex, and partly in Ireland as secretary to
Ussher. In 1639, he became chronologer to the city of London. His
advocacy of the king's cause in a series of pamphlets led to his pro-
perty being sequestrated, his manuscripts burnt and his character
traduced in a petition to parliament. This last misfortune, ac-
cording to his widow, worried him into his grave (1644). His
literary career began in 1620 with A Feast for Wormes, a para-
phrase of the book of Jonah. He gauged popular taste accurately
in employing a facile, straightforward style, much familiar wisdom
and pious allegory, an abundance of metaphors and similes from
common life, but no difficult conceits of the fashionable kind.
Divine Fancies (1632) gave a better taste of his quality, and
6
## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################
Francis Quarles
47
anticipated, in The World's a Theater, some of the success which
attended Emblemes (1635), the most famous English example of
a class of writing which began with the Milanese doctor, Alciati,
a century earlier. Visible poetry. . .
the religious lyric, which was admirably adapted to the portrayal
of subtle emotions, they achieved a modest success, while greater
poets triumphed in the ampler fields of allegory and epic.
The fascination of George Herbert is due as much to his
character as to his writings. It is true that the reputation of
The Temple was assured, and nine editions called for, before Izaak
Walton's Life made Herbert one of the most familiar figures of
the century. But The Temple, and its prose companion, The A
Priest to the Temple (1652), had already revealed the presence of
conflicting traits in their author's character, as, with a rare and
almost morbid sensitiveness, he watched his own growth and
scrutinised his moods. His personal history, therefore, is of
more than ordinary moment for understanding his poems.
The famous Border family of the Herberts had furnished a
long line of soldiers, courtiers, judges and men of affairsman
ancestry such as lord Herbert of Cherbury delighted to tell of
with a pleasing vanity. The persuasion to a more peaceful
calling reached George Herbert, not through his father's line, but
## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################
George Herbert
27
a
through his mother, Magdalen, daughter of Sir Richard Newport
of High Ercall, Shropshire. Her husband died in 1596, leaving her
with a family of seven sons and three daughters, 'Job's number
and Job's distribution as she herself would very often remember. '
George, the fifth son, was born at Montgomery on 3 April 1593, in
the same year as Walton his biographer, and Nicholas Ferrar
who stood sponsor to The Temple. Magdalen Herbert had all her
sons brought up in learning,' but most of them chose the life of
the court or the camp. It was natural to a Herbert to 'chase
brave employments with a naked sword throughout the world,' and
not even George escaped the passion and choler' of his race.
At Westminster school, under Richard Ireland, he laid the
foundation of his scholarship. His boyish performance in answer
to the veteran Andrew Melville's Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria may
be lightly dismissed as deserving neither praise nor blame; an
injudicious admirer printed it thirty years after Herbert's death.
Of greater importance are the two sonnets which he sent to his
mother as a New Year's gift, soon after his becoming a scholar of
Trinity college, Cambridge. “Doth poetry wear Venus' livery, only
serve her turn? ' he asks,
Cannot Thy love
Heighten & spirit to sound out Thy praise
As well as any she?
In this sixteen-year-old challenge to the love poetry of the day, he
probably reveals the influence of John Donne, who was already
his mother's friend, and had written many of his Divine Poems,
though they first appeared in print in the same year as The
Temple. If Herbert's early ambition to become a sacred poet never
faded from his mind, it hardly held its own during the next fifteen
years with academic ambitions of scholarship, and civic ambitions
of state employment. Even on the death of his mother in 1627,
Parentalia, the filial odes which he appended to Donne's funeral
sermon, did not include any English poems, and deserved Barnabas
Oley's comment, 'he made his ink with water of Helicon. ' His
rapid success in the university raised higher hopes. Fellow of
Trinity in 1616, and praelector of rhetoric in 1618, he aspired to
the office of public orator, 'the finest place in the University,'
as he called it, especially because it brought the orator into
relations with the court. The retiring orator, Sir Francis
Nethersole, and his predecessor, Sir Robert Naunton, held im-
portant political offices. Herbert's high connections, courtly
address and knowledge of languages were likely to win him similar
## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################
28
The Sacred Poets
promotion. He had made no secret of his intention ultimately to
seek the priesthood, and now brushed aside Nethersole's warning
that the orator's office might divert him too much from divinity.
He canvassed friends and kinsfolk for their support, and sought
to 'work the Heads to my purpose. He was installed orator on
18 January 1619, and held the post till his mother's death. As
the official mouth-piece of the university, he was expected to use
the language of flattery in addressing those whom Cambridge
delighted to honour, and he was well qualified to 'trade in cour-
tesies and wit’; but, even in an age of adulation, his hyperboles
are conspicuous. It is impossible to acquit him of self-seeking in
his use of the orator's opportunities. As Walton honestly says,
'he enjoyed his gentile humour for cloaths, and courtlike company,
and seldom look'd towards Cambridge, unless the King were there,
and then he never failed. ' According to the same witness, 'all
Mr Herbert's Court hopes' died with the death in rapid succession
of his two most influential friends, and of the king himself in 1625.
It is difficult to believe that his chances were all gone for a man
of his parts, but the sudden check served to bring once more to
the fore that alternative career which he had never put wholly
from him. Retiring 'to a friend in Kent, where he lived very
privately,' he debated with himself whether he should return to
'the painted pleasures of a Court life,' or take orders. Some part
of his hesitancy must have been overcome very soon, for he was
already a deacon", when he was instituted by proxy, on 5 July
1626, to the prebend of Leighton Ecclesia in Lincoln cathedral.
How far his entering the diaconate committed him to clerical life
cannot easily be gauged. It was one thing to qualify for honorary
preferments, it was another to throw in his lot unreservedly with
'a despised order' and its professional duties. The parallel case
of his friend Ferrar, ordained deacon in this same summer, may
throw some light upon the contemporary opinion of the diaconate.
Highly as Ferrar regarded it, he protested that 'he durst not
advance one step higher,' and clearly shared that growing
regard for the priesthood which the school of Andrewes had
encouraged. The point is important, because it indicates that
the period of conflict for Herbert was not over, and its long
continuance wrung from him poems which bear the marks of
mental suffering. The poems of this period have also many refer-
ences to his agues and failing health. Life was slipping from
? This fact has been generally overlooked or denied, but the evidence of the Lincoln
chapter acts is cited in Daniell's Life, p. 103.
## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################
The Temple
29
him, with nothing achieved, when his marriage to Jane Danvers,
in 1629, brought a happier state of mind and greater willingness
to adopt clerical life. In 1630, Philip, earl of Pembroke, asked
king Charles, in whose gift the living was for that turn, to give
Bemerton to his kinsman, and, on 26 April, Herbert was instituted
to the rectory of Fulston St Peter's with Bemerton, Wiltshire;
on 19 September he was ordained priest. The three years at
Bemerton, ending with his burial ‘in his own church under the
altar' on 3 March 1633, form that part of Walton's Life, and of
the common tradition about Herbert, which needs least correction.
‘Holy Mr Herbert' is no idealised picture of a biographer who
saw him but once; it is the estimate of his contemporaries, of
Ferrar and Oley, and of lord Herbert, who wrote that his life was
most holy and exemplary; in so much that about Salisbury, where
he lived, beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted. '
The intensity of the long struggle with himself, which had its
echoes even in Bemerton days, saves his life and writings from
anything like tameness, though there was peace at the last. The
personal note in The Temple is an unfailing interest. Herbert himself
gave the best description of his unpublished book, when, from his
deathbed, he sent it to his 'dear brother Ferrar,' with the message
that he would 'find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts
that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject
mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now
found perfect freedom. ' It is this history of a soul which gives
unity to The Temple, and makes it a book, in a sense in which
Steps to the Temple is only a collection,
Herbert was a conscientious worker, continually polishing
and resetting his poems. This fact has become clearer since
Grosart brought to notice the manuscript, including not quite
half of The Temple, which had lain, unused by previous editors, in
the Williams library. The extensive differences between the
Williams MS and the 1633 edition show that, in revision, Herbert
struck out too fantastic conceits, smoothed away roughnesses
and replaced unsatisfactory poems by others on the same themes.
It remained for a later editor, George Herbert Palmer of Harvard,
to turn the Williams MS to yet greater profit, by using it as
a basis for distinguishing between Herbert's earlier and later
work. Palmer's order, at some points, is arbitrary and uncon-
vincing ; but no greater service has been done towards under-
standing Herbert than by this attempt to arrange his poems
chronologically. Herbert's growth in artistic mastery, as well
## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################
30
The Sacred Poets
as in depth of character, is made abundantly clear by this
treatment
In metre, Herbert never goes far afield. He makes no
experiments with lines of three-syllabled feet, and even the
trochaic measure is seldom used instead of iambic. But, in
minor arrangements, as to the length of the lines, the incidence
of the rimes and the number of lines to the stanza, Herbert is
always looking out to find what will suit each particular poem.
Palmer reckons that, of the 169 poems which comprise The
Temple, ‘116 are written in metres which are not repeated. '
The variations run within a narrow circle, but, at least, they
show the poet's interest in experiments of form. In Aaron, the
same sequence of five rimes throughout the five verses is used
with consummate success, giving the effect of 'one set slow bell. '
The whole framework, in all its parts, is fashioned exactly to
fit the thought of the poem; it is artifice throughout, and yet,
within its limits, a masterpiece of art. His constructive ability
is one of his best artistic gifts. The Quip is a poem of perfect
length, its parts are well knit with a refrain and other correspond-
ences of phrase and it works to a well-turned close. The same
neatness of construction marks a dozen other short poems, like
The Pulley, Justice, Decay and the two poems oddly called
Jordan. He has an instinct for a good ending; not infrequently
there is a surprise in store, as in The Collar, where the re-
bellious mood collapses at the Master's voice, or in the first
sonnet on Prayer, where a string of definitions, both felicitous
and preposterous, leads up to the simplest possible description of
prayer as 'something understood. ' He has also a pretty turn for
personification, which puts life into reflective poems like The
Quip, Avarice and The Collar. To see how it gives animation
to his work, one has only to compare Herbert's Decay with
Vaughan's imitation, Corruption.
Herbert's ingenuity, at times, misleads him into what can only
be called tricks, like the representation of the echo in Heaven, or
the intentional failure of the rime at the close of Home. The
verses shaped like an altar and the Easter wings came under
Addison's condemnation as 'false wit. ' They would find no
parallel to-day except in Alice in Wonderland, but many of
Herbert's fellow poets—Drummond and Wither and Quarles-
took pleasure in such devices, as well as in anagrams and acrostics.
The number of Herbert's poems affected by this fashion is very
small; but it has most unjustly told against him with his critics.
## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################
Herbert's Conceits
31
6
A more serious defect of taste he shares with the poets whom
Johnson styled 'metaphysical. ' The fantastic conceits which fashion
approved in secular poetry are drawn into the service of Christian
piety; as Chudleigh wrote of Donne's use of wit in his Divine
Poems:
He did not banish, but transplanted it.
There is more regard for the quaintness and unexpectedness of a
simile than for its beauty or fitness. Johnson's criticism is at least
sometimes justified in Herbert's case, that “the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together. ' Things great and small are
grouped in incongruous, and even unpleasant, association. It was
an article of Herbert's creed that nothing can be so mean' but
that it can be ennobled to bright and clean uses, and he was
justified in his use of illustrations from common life, folk-lore and
the medicinal and chemical knowledge which had great fascination
for seventeenth century writers. The candle's snuff, the bias
of the bowls, the tuning of an instrument, a blunted knife and cold
hands that are angrie with the fire,' are successful and popular
elucidations of his thought. But the perils of falling into prosiness
or bathos beset his path. The fine theme in Providence that man
is the world's high priest' cannot recover its dignity after such a
playful extravagance as this:
Most things move th' underjaw; the Crocodile not.
Most things sleep lying; th' Elephant loans or stands.
The Psalmist is responsible for the saying, 'put Thou my tears
into Thy bottle,' but Herbert must add, 'As we have boxes for
the poor. ' Far worse than mere absurdity or prosiness is the
intolerable conceit which ends The Dawning, where the 'sad
heart' is bidden to dry his tears in Christ's burial-linen. Such
instances, though they are rare in Herbert, compare with Crashaw's
excesses in The Weeper. Both poets, too, draw from the senses of
smell and taste images which make a modern reader, rightly or
wrongly, ill at ease. "This broth of smells, that feeds and fats my
minde,' in The Odour, is nearly as unpleasing as Crashaw's 'brisk
cherub,' that sips of the Magdalene's tears, till
9
>
>
his song
Tasts of this Breakfast all day long.
But, despite these temptations to over-daring and tasteless conceits,
Herbert got more good than harm from the metaphysical fashion.
His interest in thought and in recondite illustration saves him from
being thin or facile. He far more often errs by trying to pack too
much into small compass, or by being too ingenious, than by working
## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################
32
The Sacred Poets
a single thought threadbare, as his successors and imitators often do.
A fine instance of his power of concentrated thought is his poem
Man. And if he is sometimes too artificial, there is no lack of
emotional quality in Herbert at his best. There are poems in
many different keys like Throw away thy rod, Antiphon and The
Collar, which are all tremulous with feeling.
It remains to notice The Church Porch, in which Herbert
meets the young gallant on his own ground, and avoids the higher
arguments that belong to The Church. The well-bred, well-in-
formed man of the world, who knows the ways of learning,
honour, pleasure,' gives his good-tempered counsels with many
a shrewd hit, but without malice. The collector of Outlandish
Proverbs is the right man to coin these terse maxims of mother-
wit. There is no English book of wisdom which holds its own so
well; it is kept from cynicism by its humour, and from going out
of date by its writer's knowledge of the world.
The anonymous preface to Crashaw's Steps to the Temple
(1646) introduces the author with the words, 'Here's Herbert's
second, but equall. ' In the same volume, Crashaw pays a tribute
to his predecessor in the lines which he sent to a gentlewoman
with a copy of The Temple :
Know you faire on what you look;
Divinest love lyes in this booke.
But there is hardly a poem by Crashaw which recalls Herbert,
and the two men are widely different in temperament and
genius. Crashaw's debt to the older poet is not so much technical
as spiritual. The memory of Herbert's self-consecration was still
fresh at Cambridge, when The Temple was issued from a Cambridge
a
press in Crashaw's second year at Pembroke, and that memory
was specially treasured by Crashaw's friends at Little Gidding?
Richard Crashaw was born in 1612 or 1613? He never knew
his mother; his step-mother was commended by Ussher for ‘her
singular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor,' but
she, too, passed quickly out of his life. His father, William
Crashaw, was a noted preacher, who spent his substance in buying
books and publishing his own contributions to the Roman contro-
1 Crashaw contributed to Ferrar and Herbert's Hygiasticon, 1634.
2 1612 is preferable to 1613. His father states in The Honour of Vertue (1620), that
Ussher had preached at Richard's baptism eight years afore. ' His age at the time of
his election to Pembroke on 6 July 1631 is given as 18, which, if it simply implies his
age at his last birthday, would, also, allow of the date 1612.
## p. 33 (#49) ##############################################
Crashaw at Cambridge 33
versy. The contrast between the father's anti-papal vehemence
and the son's ardent Catholicism has often suggested that Richard's
change of religion was a reaction from his father's teaching. But,
apart from the fact that Richard was only fourteen when his father
died, there must also be noticed another strain in the writings
and character of the elder Crashaw. The violent contro-
versialist of The Jesuittes Gospel concerns us less than the
mystically-minded editor of A Manuall for true Catholickes.
In the Manuall (1611), William Crashaw thought fit to gather,
out of the most misty times of Popery,' many ancient de-
votions for the sick and the dying, such as the eloquent ‘Go
forth, o Christian soule. ' The man who could see the beauty of
these prayers through the mists of prejudice, and, in spite of
violent disagreement with their doctrines, could translate a
Jesuit's hymns to the Virgin, has some share in the authorship
of the hymns to St Teresa and the Magdalene.
From Charterhouse, Richard Crashaw was elected to a scholar-
ship at Pembroke hall, Cambridge, on 6 July 1631, and, in the
following autumn, he commemorated the death of a fellow of his
college, William Herrys, in a sheaf of elegies, Latin and English,
The English poems, especially the second, Death, what dost? o hold
thy Blow, show the influence of Jonson, though there is already
revealed something of the high colour and passionate note which
distinguish Crashaw's later work. In the earlier years of his
academic life, as was natural, he gave more attention to Latin
than to English verse, and, in the year of taking his first degree,
he published Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, with dedicatory
odes to his school and college preceptors. One of the odes, in
praise of his tutor, John Tournay, who had recently incurred
the vice-chancellor's censure for maintaining the insufficiency of
faith alone, shows that Crashaw was passing under high church
influences. This sympathy is still more noticeable in the lines
On a Treatise of Charity, which were prefixed to the Discourses,
put forth in the following year by Robert Shelford, of Ringsfield
in Suffolk, Priest,' a book denounced by Ussher as 'rotten stuff. ”
After an eloquent defence of the relation of art to religion,
Crashaw ends with ten vigorous lines which were omitted from all
subsequent issues of his poems. He attacks 'the zealous ones'
who make it 'a point of Faith' to call the pope 'Anti-Christ';
‘;
What e're it be,
I'm sure it is no point of Charitie.
Crashaw's election to a fellowship at Peterhouse, on 20 November
0
>
E. L. VIL
CU, II.
3
## p. 34 (#50) ##############################################
34
The Sacred Poets
1636', caused him to make his home there for the greater part of
the next eight years. There was much that was congenial to him
in that society; another poet, Joseph Beaumont, was elected in
the same year, and Crashaw's Latin poems show his interest in
Cosin's schemes for the decoration of the new chapel. Of his
Cambridge life and interests, little can be gathered except from
his poems and from the anonymous editor's preface to Steps to the
Temple. This preface is not wholly trustworthy evidence*; but
there is no reason to doubt its witness to Crashaw's living a
recluse and ascetic life, and imitating the nightly vigils of the
Gidding community. As he afterwards told his friend, Thomas
Carre, he was known in Cambridge days as 'the chaplaine of the
Virgine myld. ' His indifference about food and drink is noted by
both his editors; Carre calls him 'a very bird of paradice' for his
unworldliness. For vacant hours, he had other pursuits besides
poetry, but all of them artistic. His skill in 'drawing, limning,
graving' is exemplified in the designs which he prepared for
Carmen Deo Nostro.
Already, his ardent temperament gave a warmth to his devo-
tional writing such as has been rarely seen in any English writer.
The canonisation of St Teresa in 1622 produced much literature
about her, and a wide circulation of her books. When the author
was yet among the protestantes,' as he shows in An Apologie, her
writings moved him to impassioned utterance :
Thine own dear bookes are guilty. For from thence
I learn't to know that love is eloquence.
He was conscious that Englishmen would regard his interest in
the Spanish mystic as requiring excuse, but he boldly claims
Teresa for his 'soul's countryman':
O'tis not Spanish, but 'tis hear'n she speaks.
Crashaw's knowledge of Spanish and Italian affected both the
matter and the manner of his poetry. Not only did it bring the
writings of the Spanish mystics within his reach, but, also, it
infected him with the hyperboles and luscious sweetness of the
Neapolitan poet, Marino.
1 Grosart, vol. I, p. xxxi, gives the Latin document of his admission as fellow, but
understands it as referring only to his joining the college, and assigns his fellowship
to 1637, after a year's residence at Peterhouse. Other writers have followed Grosart.
* It can bardly be written by a Cambridge man, because of the evident confusion
between “St Maries Church neere St Peters Colledge,' where the poet is said to have
lodged under Tertullian's roofe of angels,' and the new chapel of the college with its
famous angel roof which the parliamentary agent, William Dowsing, destroyed in
December 1643. See Walker, T. A. , Peterhouse, pp. 109, 110.
a
6
## p. 35 (#51) ##############################################
Crashaw's Later Years
35
6
Whether the panegyrist of St Teresa could have remained
content with Laud's 'Beauty of Holiness' is doubtful; but the
destructive violence of the parliamentary commissioners and the
downfall of church and king at Naseby must have made him
despair of the Anglican church. On his being deprived of his
fellowship on 8 April 1644, or, perhaps, without waiting for this
misfortune, he seems to have gone to Oxford, and cannot be traced
again till Cowley found him, in 1646, in Paris. By this time, he had
become a Roman Catholic, and the authour's friend' in the preface
a
to Steps to the Temple, which was published in this year, speaks of
him as 'now dead to us. ' Crashaw cannot be charged with self-
seeking in changing his creed, for he was in sore straits when
his brother-poet brought him to the notice of Henrietta Maria,
who was then in Paris. With letters of introduction from the
queen, and with pecuniary help from others, including, probably,
the countess of Denbigh, whose 'goodnes and charity' he acknow-
ledges on the title-page of his next volume, Crashaw set out for
Rome. There he became secretary to cardinal Palotta, governor
of Rome. An English traveller, John Bargrave, who had been
ejected with Crashaw from Peterhouse, describes Palotta as
papable and esteemed worthy by all. ' The same writer gives
the last scanty notice of the poet. His delicate conscience was
distressed by the laxity of the cardinal's household, and he
denounced them to his master, a man of stern morals. Palotta
recognised that Rome was no longer a safe place for Crashaw
after this exposure, and at once procured him a minor office in the
church of our Lady of Loretto, of which he was patron. He was
instituted on 24 April 1649, and, by the following August, another
had his office, Crashaw having died of a fever, which, perhaps,
he had contracted on the journey. There he was buried, the
‘richest offering of Loretto's shrine. ' Cowley's elegy on the ‘Poet
and Saint' remains Crashaw's best monument, and is a fit tribute
from him whom the elder poet acclaimed, on the strength of his
Poeticall Blossomes, as 'young master of the world's maturitie. '
Crashaw's posthumous volume, Carmen Deo Nostro (1652), which
contained almost all that was good in the earlier volumes with
many valuable additions, had a sympathetic editor, Thomas Carre,
'confessor to the English nuns at Paris,' but the French printers
made sorry work with the English words.
a
1 Not 11 June, as Grosart and others after him. Seo Walker, T. A. , Peterhouse,
p. 108.
See D. of N. B, for his real name, Miles Pinkney.
3_2
## p. 36 (#52) ##############################################
36
The Sacred Poets
Crasbaw sought his earliest inspiration in foreign models
rather than in his English predecessors. A curiously high pro-
portion of his work, both early and late, consists of translations.
Prominence was given in the volume of 1646 to his translation of
the first canto of Marino's Strage degli Innocenti. The poem
was congenial to the translator, in whose hands it grew even
more ornate than the original. A copious use of epithets,
which are generally felicitous, a free use of alliteration and
an ecstatic emphasis are already characteristic of his style.
The eighteenth century, peculiarly disqualified from appreciating
Crashaw's religious enthusiasm, retained an interest for Sospetto,
mainly because of its connection with Milton. Pride of place
was given in The Delights of the Muses to a translation of a
Jesuit schoolmaster's rhetorical exercise, on which Ford also
employed his skill in The Lovers Melancholy. The nightingale's
song has never had such lavish delineation as in Musicks duell;
but the poem is too ingenious and sophisticated to give the
atmosphere of the country. There is far more charm in the dainty
song from the Italian, To thy Lover, Deere, discover, and in Come
and let us live my Deare, from Catullus. Translations of Latin
hymns occupy a large space, especially in his last volume. They
have great merit, but seldom the particular merit of the originals.
Thus, his Dies Irae has many beauties and fine touches, but it
fails to represent the masculine strength of the Latin. Even
Vexilla Regis cannot escape his favourite phrase, a 'full nest
of loves. ' His warm, sensuous imagination kindles with his
subject, and he passes only too easily into 'a sweet inebriated
ecstasy. '
Crashaw did better work when he relied upon himself, as in
Loves Horoscope and Wishes. To his (supposed) Mistresse. It is
only this last-named example which makes one's faith waver in
Crashaw's own judgment that his secular was inferior to his sacred
The airy metre of Wishes, with its lengthening lines, is
exactly fitted to its graceful humour. But, delicate as this poem is,
it cannot sustain a comparison with his Hymne to St Teresa. The
one is intense with passion, the other is playful and superficial.
"The very outgoings of the soule’are in the divine poems; there is
grace and dainty trifling, but no more, in the love poems. Nowhere
in the secular poems do we find the elan, the surrender to an
inspiration, the uprush of feeling which carries all before it.
Crashaw's passionate outbursts, with their flaming brilliancy, and
their quick-moving lines, are hard to parallel in the language, and
verse,
6
## p. 37 (#53) ##############################################
Crashaw's Qualities
37
it is his ardent religious emotion which sets them on fire. He may
borrow too freely, for some tastes, from the language of amorous
poetry; but it was natural to him to call St Teresa ‘my rosy love'
or the Virgin a 'rosy princess,' and he serves them with a noble
chivalrous devotion.
There are as serious faults in his sacred, as in his secular, poems.
Indeed, the faults are more apparent, because they occur in a
finer setting. Crashaw's failures are peculiarly exasperating,
because they spoil work which had greater potentialities than
that of many poets who have maintained a better level. There
are inspired moments, when he outdistances all his rivals, as in
the lines which he added to his first version of The Flaming
Heart, or in the fuller version of the poem To the Countess of
Denbigh Vaughan may disappoint by long stretches of flatness,
but Crashaw more often gives positive offence by an outrageous
conceit, by gaudy colour, by cloying sweetness or by straining
of an idea which has been squeezed dry. His defective powers
of self-criticism make Crashaw the most unequal of our poets.
The Weeper contains some of his best and some of his worst
lines That he had no sureness of touch in reviewing his own
work, becomes clear when it is noticed that many of the verses
in The Weeper which have alienated his readers were either
additions to the original version, or disastrously misplaced. In
the revised form, a verse which few can read without distaste
is followed by these perfect lines :
Not in the evening's eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dyes,
Sitts sorrow with a face so fair;
No where but here did over meet
Sweetnesse so sad, sadnesse so sweet.
Within a few months of Crashaw's death, the first part of Silex
Scintillans had appeared (1650). Henry Vaughan, the elder of
twins, was born on 17 April 1621, at Newton St Bridget on the
Usk, in the parish of Llansantffread near Brecon. His chosen name,
Silurist, expresses his intimate love of the Welsh mountains and
valleys, with their rocks and streams, woodlands and solitary
places, among which he spent his childhood and all the years of
his professional life. Both he and his twin brother Thomas ex-
press their debt to Matthew Herbert, rector of Llangattock,
who schooled them for six years, before they went up to Jesus
.
I see
care
## p. 38 (#54) ##############################################
38
The Sacred Poets
college, Oxford, in 1638? He acquired sufficient Latinity to find
his chief reading, outside his professional studies and contemporary
poetry, in the fathers of the church. He left Oxford for London,
with the idea of studying for the law, but, at some date unknown,
abandoned it for medicine. The only record of these London
days is in the slight little volume of Poems, with the tenth Satyre
of Juvenal Englished, which he printed in 1646. Except for some
feeling for nature, there is nothing that anticipates the distinctive
quality of Silex Scintillans. The love-songs to Amoret, in which
he reveals his kinship with Jonson, Donne and Habington, are
not original enough to suggest that he would ever have risen
above what half a dozen of the court poets were doing at least
as well. More interesting is the literary flavour which he tries
to give to the book, in the opening poem, with its homage to
'Great Ben' and Randolph, and in the Rhapsodis on the Globe
tavern. He would have his readers believe that he is of the
school of Ben, and seeks inspiration in churchwarden pipes and
'royal witty sack, the poet's soul. ' It may be nothing more than
a youthful pose, with its suggestion of duns and debts, full cups
and the disorderly Strand, but their author took it seriously
when, in his preface of 1654, he 'most humbly and earnestly'
begged that none would read his early poems.
Before the end of the next year (1647), Vaughan, apparently,
had settled down to the life of the country, and wrote from
'Newton by Usk'a dedication to Olor Iscanus. The book, however,
did not appear till 1651, and, even then, only under another's
auspices, the author having ‘long ago condemned these poems to
obscurity. The reason for this postponement is the crisis in
Vaughan’s life, which will be more fitly described in connection
with the issue of Silex. The poem which gave its name to Olor
Iscanus sings the praise of the Usk. It has reminiscences of
Browne's Pastorals. Denham’s Cooper's Hill had already appeared,
but its most famous lines on the Thames were not inserted till
after Vaughan's lines were written. The most remarkable, if,
also, the strangest, poem in the collection is the Donne-like
Charnel House. Its forcible epithets—shoreless thoughts, vast
tenter'd hope'-and its array of odd words and similes compel
attention in spite of its morbid cast of thought. There are not
1 Doubt has sometimes been thrown on Anthony & Wood's statement that Henry
spent two years or more in logicals under a noted tutor' at Oxford; but it is confirmed
by Vaughan's letter to Aubrey (Wood's constant source of information), in which he says
that he stayed not at Oxford to take any degree. ' Aubrey's Brief Lives, vol. II, p. 269.
## p. 39 (#55) ##############################################
Vaughan's Secular Poems
39
6
any love poems, but many memorials of friendship, which had
ever a large place in Vaughan's thoughts. The bulk of the work
clearly belongs to the period before Silex was written, and re-
flects the atmosphere of the 1646 volume, with its allusions to
debts and gay living, and its complimentary verses upon secular
writers, D'Avenant, John Fletcher, 'the ever-memorable Mr
William Cartwright' and 'the matchless Orinda. ' The poems
about his friends who took part in the civil war suggest, but do
not clearly settle, the question whether the poet himself took any
active part. There are passages where he takes satisfaction in
the thought that his hands are clean of 'innocent blood. ' On
the other hand, he alludes to a time when this juggling fate of
soldiery first seiz'd me,' and also seems to write as an eyewitness
of the battle of Rowton heath? There are more signs of his hatred
of existing authority than of any active enthusiasm for the royal
cause, except that the poem to Thomas Powell, his ‘loyal fellow-
prisoner,' and a prayer in adversity, in The Mount of Olives, seem
to imply that, then or later, he suffered in property and person.
The poem that affords the greatest chronological difficulty is
called "To his retired friend, an Invitation to Brecknock. ' The
words, ‘since Charles, his reign,' seem to demand a date after the
king's execution, but it is difficult to reconcile its flippant, reckless
tone with the consistently serious temper of Silex, which was
published in 1650. Perhaps the poet counted Charles's reign as
over with the crushing defeat of 1645, and so the poem may be
contemporary with others of its kind and not with the poems of
Silex. One of the few poems which are certainly late, the epitaph.
on the little lady Elizabeth, who died of grief at Carisbrooke in
September 1650, is a worthy companion of Vaughan's best work.
The turning point in Vaughan's spiritual and literary history
occurs somewhere in the period preceding the publication of the
first part of Silex Scintillans (1650). There are many indications
in this volume, and in the preface which he wrote in 1654 for the
second part (1655), that he underwent a prolonged and painful
sickness, which nearly cost him his life. Even in 1654, he believes
himself to be 'at no great distance from death,' though he hopes
that he is spared to make amends for a misspent youth. In
language that appears excessive, at any rate in view of any.
thing that he published, he deplores his share in the 'foul and
overflowing stream' of corrupting literature, and ascribes his
1 The tempting solution, that he was present as a surgeon, must be set aside,
because his medical studies were probably not begun till later.
## p. 40 (#56) ##############################################
40
The Sacred Poets
change of view to the blessed man, Mr George Herbert, whose holy
life and verse gained many pious converts, of whom I am the least. '
The nature of Vaughan's obligations to Herbert has been the
subject of much controversy. The first and greatest debt is that
Herbert directed Vaughan's genius into the channel where only
it achieved notable and lasting success. Vaughan found himself
in Silea Scintillans; even the few successes outside that volume,
like The Eagle and the Epitaph on the lady Elizabeth, were
written after his conversion. What readers have cared to re-
member are not his poems to Amoret and Etesia, or the occasional
verse to friends and literary idols, with its jaunty tone and
petulant impatience of the time's ridiculous misery,' but the
remote, timeless, mysterious poems of Silex Scintillans. It is
credit enough to the older poet to have given his disciple
spiritual quickening and the gift of gracious feeling. But the
influence of Herbert, for better and for worse, is literary as well
as spiritual. Recent editors of Vaughan, by their extensive
collections of parallel passages, have placed it beyond dispute
that the younger writer, in his new-born enthusiasm for "holy
Herbert,' modelled himself on the author of The Temple. Many
of his poems are little more than resettings of Herbert's thought
and very words ; even the best poems, where Vaughan is most
original, have verbal reminiscences, which show how he soaked
himself in Herbert's poems. Sometimes, familiar words have
received a subtle transmutation ; sometimes, they have only
enslaved Vaughan to his disadvantage. The little tricks of
Herbert's style—the abrupt openings, the questions and ejacu-
lations, the homely words and conceits, the whimsical titles
are employed by Vaughan as his very framework. In the matter
of form, Vaughan failed to learn what Herbert had to teach.
He knows less well than Herbert when to stop, and, after
beginning with lines of such intensity as Herbert could never
have written, he is apt to lose his way and forfeit the interest
of his readers.
The real contributions of Vaughan to literature are, naturally,
those poems where he is most himself and calls no man master.
His mind and temper are essentially distinct from Herbert's.
After the change in his life, he becomes detached in mind from
the ordinary interests and ideas of his times, with which he was
in any case out of sympathy, and, as with a true mystic, his
thoughts move in a rarer, remoter air. He may dutifully follow
Herbert in celebrating the festivals of the church ; but such
## p. 41 (#57) ##############################################
Vaughan's Sacred Poems
41
concrete themes do not suit him like the more mysterious and
abstract themes of eternity, communion with the dead, nature and
childhood. The death of a younger brother occasioned a sequence
of poems in which the note of personal loss, poignant though it is,
is not more prominent than a wistful brooding over man's re-
lations with the unseen and the eternal. This theme receives
yet finer treatment in two of his best-known poems, The World
and They are all gone into the world of light. The Retreat
combines this theme with another, the innocence of childhood,
which recurs in Corruption and Childhood. In The Retreat,
which has the added interest of being the germ of Words-
worth's ode', Intimations of Immortality, Vaughan achieves a
simplicity of expression which is rare with him. Some of his
most perfect work occurs where both thought and expression
are simple, as in Peace, The Burial of an Infant, or Christ's
Nativity. More often his gift of expression is not sustained, and
the magic of the opening lines, e. g.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
soon deserts him. His workmanship becomes defective, his
rhythms halting and his expression crabbed.
Another link with Wordsworth is Vaughan's intimate and
religious feeling for nature, He has an open-air love for all
natural sights and sounds, and a subtle sympathy even with the
fallen timber or the stones at his feet. He is happier away from
the world of men, and can rejoice equally in
Dear Night! this world's defeat, the stop to busy fools,
and in the stir that heralds the dawn. It is in his observation of
nature that he achieves his most felicitous epithets—the unthrift
sun,' 'the pursy clouds' and 'purling corn. ' The setting of
these natural descriptions is usually religious, as in The Rainbow
or The Dawning ; but the lover of nature is as apparent as the
mystical thinker.
Into the space of half a dozen years, Vaughan crowded all
his best work. His prose translations and original books of
devotion belong to the same period. The Mount of Olives reveals
the occasions of many of his poems, and shows that he has been
wrongly described as a pantheist. The silence of the forty years
that he had yet to live is broken only by Thalia Rediviva (1678).
Trench elicited the interesting fact that Wordsworth owned & copy of Silex
Scintillans, at that time a rare book. Household Book of English Poetry, 2nd ed.
.
## p. 42 (#58) ##############################################
42
The Sacred Poets
For this volume, as for Olor Iscanus, the author did not make
himself responsible. Most of its contents clearly belong to
earlier days. A few poems only appear to have been written
after the restoration; for example, The True Christmas, which
;
shows Vaughan to be as little in sympathy with the laxity of the
monarchy as with the tyranny of the commonwealth. There is
an echo of his former successes in The Retirement and other
numbers of the section, which is called Pious Thoughts and
Ejaculations. The volume is also interesting because it contains
the verse-remains of his brother, 'Eugenius Philalethes,' who
died in 1666. Of Henry Vaughan, there is no further record,
except some casual allusions in the correspondence of his cousin,
John Aubrey, till the record of his tombstone in Llansantffread
churchyard, commemorating his death on 23 April 1695, at the
age of 73! His retired life was in keeping with his small fame
as a writer. He knew that his writing was 'cross to fashion,' and
only one of his books reached a second edition ; with that exception,
nothing was reprinted for nearly two hundred years. He holds
his place now, not for the mass of his work, but for a few
unforgettable lines, and for a rare vein of thought, which re-
mained almost unworked again till Wordsworth’s nature poems
and Tennyson's In Memoriam.
6
The religious and mystical literature of the seventeenth century
has been recently enriched by Bertram Dobell's discovery of
Thomas Traherne, who is specially welcome for his fresh and
interesting outlook on life. Like Herbert and Vaughan, he
came from the Welsh borders, and had his full share of Celtic
fervour. The son of a Hereford shoemaker, he entered Brasenose
college, Oxford, in 1652, and graduated in arts and divinity. He
was admitted in 16577 to the rectory of Credenhill, near Hereford,
where he remained for about ten years, until, in 1667, he was
made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, on his appointment as
lord keeper, when the Cabal ministry took office. After seven
years in this service, Traherne died in his patron's house at
Teddington, near Hampton court, and was buried on 10 October
1674, ‘in the Church there, under the reading-desk. ' According
1 According to the tombstone: but he completed 74 years six days before his death,
? If Traherne was of canonical age at the time of his institution, this may,
perhaps, indicate the year of his birth as not later than 1634, though it has been usual
to give 1636 on the assumption that he was sixteen when he matriculated in 1652.
Crashaw went to Cambridge at the age of eighteen, and a poor student like Traberne.
may well bave found difficulty in going up earlier.
了
.
## p. 43 (#59) ##############################################
Thomas Traherne
43
to Anthony à Wood, he always led a simple and devout life ;
his will shows that he possessed little beyond his books, and
thought it worth while to bequeath his 'old hat. '
In his lifetime, he published only Roman Forgeries (1673),
which might be left to slumber, except for its preface, showing
his scholarly love of the Bodleian library, 'which is the glory of
Oxford, and this nation. ' Just before his death, he sent to the
press Christian Ethics (1675), and, a quarter of a century later, the
non-juring divine, George Hickes, printed anonymously, with a
friend's account of the nameless author, A serious and patheticall
Contemplation of the Mercies of God. This latter work contained
thanksgivings for all the common blessings of life, arranged
rhythmically, much in the manner of bishop Andrewes's Devotions.
The rest of Traherne's works remained in manuscript till the
Poems were printed in 1903, and Centuries of Meditations in
1908. Another octavo volume of meditations and devotions is
still extant in manuscript.
All these works, except the controversial volume, reveal an
original mind, dominated by certain characteristic thoughts, which
are commended to the reader by a glowing rhetoric and a fine
conviction of their sufficiency. Like Vaughan, Traherne retains
an idyllic remembrance of the innocence and spiritual insight of
childhood, and insists that he ‘must become a child again. ' The
child knew nothing of 'churlish proprieties,' and rightly regarded
himself as 'heir of the whole world':
Long time before
I in my mother's womb was born,
A God preparing did this glorious store
The world for me adorn.
Into His Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.
Only with much ado' was the child taught by his elders to prize
gew-gaws above the common things of earth and sky; it was a
difficult matter to persuade me that the tinseled ware upon a
hobby-horse was a fine thing. But the lesson was successfully
taught, and now, for the man who would recover felicity, there
was no remedy left but to get free of 'the burden and cumber
of devised wants,' and to recognise again the true wealth of
earth's commonest gifts. Man could do God Himself no greater
homage than to delight in His creation:
Our blessedness to see
ls eren to the Deity
A Beatific Vision! He attains
His Ends while we enjoy. In us He reigns.
>
## p. 44 (#60) ##############################################
44
The Sacred Poets
It is a fortunate circumstance that Traherne has given parallel
expression to his leading ideas both in verse and in prose, as it
affords an opportunity of estimating which medium was the better
at his command. His mind was poetic and imaginative rather
than philosophic and logical, and yet it may be urged, with some
confidence, that he achieved more unquestionable success with his
prose than with his verse. Even the opening poems on the
thoughts of childhood, beautiful as they are, have nothing so
striking as the corresponding prose passage, which begins : The
corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from ever-
lasting to everlasting. Again, the poems on Thoughts, as being
every man’s ‘substantial treasures,' are less flowing and musical
than such lines as these :
I can visit Noah in his ark, and swim upon the waters of the deluge. I can
see Moses with his rod, and the children of Israel passing through the sea. . . .
I can visit Solomon in his glory, and go into his temple, and view the sitting
of his servants, and admire the magnificence and glory of his kingdom. No
ereature but one like unto the Holy Angels can see into all ages. . . . It is not
by going with the feet, but by journeys of the Soul, that we travel thither.
Such writing as this has some of the magical quality and personal
note of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.
As a poet, Traherne has not mastered his technique. His
poems are often diffuse and full of repetitions. He is obsessed
with the rime, 'treasures' and 'pleasures,' using it on page after
page; and, even for an age that was not careful of such things,
the proportion of defective rimes is high. The categorical habit,
also, has had disastrous effects, in unbroken strings of fifteen
nouns in one poem, thirteen adjectives in another, fourteen par-
ticiples in a third. In other poems, the didactic purpose gets the
upper hand, and we hear the preacher's voice: This, my dear
friends, this was my blessed case. ' In spite of such poems as
Wonder, News, Silence and The Ways of Wisdom, he wrote
nothing in verse that is so arresting as his rhetorical prose:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and per-
ceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because
men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
The success of Herbert's Temple inevitably produced a crop
of imitations, ranging from Christopher Harvey's Synagogue,
which, by being bound up with The Temple in many editions
from 1640 onwards, achieved a reputation beyond its deserts,
1
1
1
## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################
William Habington
45
down to the doggerel and wholesale plagiarism of Samuel
Speed's Prison Pietie (1677). Vaughan rightly complained of
these facile imitators that they cared more for verse than
perfection. ' Those of Herbert's contemporaries who attempted
sacred verse without falling under his influence deserve more
consideration. To right and to left of Herbert stand William
Habington and Francis Quarles. Both belong by birth to the
country gentry; but the former found readers only among his
own class, while the latter was more successful than any writer of
his time in gauging the protestant religious feeling of English-
men at large. Habington's associations from birth onwards were
with the Roman Catholic minority. He was born at Hindlip hall
near Worcester, a house famous for its concealment of priests,
on the very day on which the Gunpowder plot was discovered
in consequence (so tradition has said) of his mother's letter to
lord Monteagle. His father was an antiquary, whose History of
Edward IV the son completed and published in 1640. William
Habington, after being educated at St Omer and Paris with a
view to his becoming a priest, returned to England and, probably
in the early months of 1633, married Lucy Herbert, youngest
daughter of the first baron Powis. Her praises he celebrated
in Castara, which he published anonymously in 1634. The two
parts of which it then consisted contain poems of courtship and
of marriage. A new edition of Castara, a year later, revealed the
author's name, and added to the second part a set of eight elegies
on his friend, George Talbot, which would more properly have
constituted a third part, and three characters of a mistress, a
wife and a friend, introducing the three sections. In 1640, a
third edition included an entirely new third part, consisting of
a character of 'A Holy Man,' and a collection of sacred poems.
The author recognises that he may be thought ‘a Precisian' for
his unfashionable praise of chastity, but he would not win even
'the spreadingst laurell’by writing wanton or profane. ' In the
third part, he leaves the theme of earthly love to the soft silken
youths at Court,' and is full of self-accusation that he should
ever have handled the theme, however purely. There is a
sombre and monotonous strain running through this third part.
Advancing death, empty fame and decay of the tomb itself are its
constant subjects. Unlike Traherne, he hardly finds life worth
enjoying, with death awaiting him:
And should I farme the proudest state,
I'me Tennant to uncertaine fate.
There is grim humour in the description of his deathbed, where
## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################
46
The Sacred Poets
6
he seems to be a mourner at his own obsequies. He can put
no trust in the predictions of astrologer or doctor :
They onely practise how to make
A mistery of each mistake.
In most of the poems there are occasional fine lines, as in the
welcome to death as a safe retreat,
Where the leane slave, who th' Oare doth plye,
Soft as his Admirall may lye.
More sustained excellence is found in the poems Nox nocti
indicat Scientiam, Et exultavit Humiles and Cupio dissolvi.
But, in many of these meditative and frigid poems, the thought
is commonplace and uncommended by graceful expression, or
accent of sincerity. Defects of workmanship rather than of taste
mar his work; he judged himself rightly, when he admitted in
his preface that he needed to spend ‘more sweate and oyle,' if he
would aspire to the name of poet. Greater pains might have
eliminated his excessive use of the expletive 'do,' many weak
rime-endings, clumsy syntax and harsh elisions (e. g. 'th' An’chrits
prayer,' ''mid th' horrors,' 'sh' admires,' 'so 'bhors'). In the
same year as the complete Castara, appeared The Queene of
Arragon. A Tragi-Comedie. The author died in 1654 and was
buried where my forefathers ashes sleepe. ' His own modest
estimate of his verses will not be challenged, that they are not
so high, as to be wondred at, nor so low as to be contemned. '
Quarles was as little affected as was Habington by the school of
Donne. His chief literary idol was Phineas Fletcher, 'the Spenser
of this age. He was born in 1592 at his father's manor house
.
of Stewards, near Romford in Essex. After studying at Cam-
bridge and Lincoln's inn, he went abroad, like his contemporary
Ferrar, in the train of the princess Elizabeth, on her marriage
with the elector palatine. After his return to England, he seems
to have lived partly in Essex, and partly in Ireland as secretary to
Ussher. In 1639, he became chronologer to the city of London. His
advocacy of the king's cause in a series of pamphlets led to his pro-
perty being sequestrated, his manuscripts burnt and his character
traduced in a petition to parliament. This last misfortune, ac-
cording to his widow, worried him into his grave (1644). His
literary career began in 1620 with A Feast for Wormes, a para-
phrase of the book of Jonah. He gauged popular taste accurately
in employing a facile, straightforward style, much familiar wisdom
and pious allegory, an abundance of metaphors and similes from
common life, but no difficult conceits of the fashionable kind.
Divine Fancies (1632) gave a better taste of his quality, and
6
## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################
Francis Quarles
47
anticipated, in The World's a Theater, some of the success which
attended Emblemes (1635), the most famous English example of
a class of writing which began with the Milanese doctor, Alciati,
a century earlier. Visible poetry. . .
