class of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are
ever floating in the upper air of it.

What I said of a peculiar Æolian word-music in William Drummond applies
with equal truth to Crashaw; while of our own poets, somehow or other, he
reminds me of Shelley, in the silvery shine and bell-like melody both of
his verse and his imagery; and in one of his poems, _Music's Duel_, the
fineness of his phrase reminds me of Keats. But I must not forget that it
is only with his sacred, his best poems too, that I am now concerned.

The date of his birth is not known with certainty, but it is judged about
1616, the year of Shakspere's death. He was the son of a Protestant
clergyman zealous even to controversy. By a not unnatural reaction
Crashaw, by that time, it is said, a popular preacher, when expelled from
Oxford in 1644 by the Puritan Parliament because of his refusal to sign
their Covenant, became a Roman Catholic. He died about the age of
thirty-four, a canon of the Church of Loretto. There is much in his
verses of that sentimentalism which, I have already said in speaking of
Southwell, is rife in modern Catholic poetry. I will give from Crashaw a
specimen of the kind of it. Avoiding a more sacred object, one stanza
from a poem of thirty-one, most musical, and full of lovely speech
concerning the tears of Mary Magdalen, will suit my purpose.

Hail, sister springs,
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever-bubbling things!
Thawing crystal! Snowy hills,
Still spending, never spent!--I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!