'Cause another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flowery meads in May;
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?"—
are exquisite lines, that no reader ever forgets.
Crashaw (b., 1616; d., 1650) was of a deeply religious tone of mind, and became a Catholic. His finest poems are his religious ones, and they are full of music and passionate reveries, yet disfigured by the Donne fashion, which Dryden, and after him Johnson, inaccurately termed the Metaphysical School, instead of the Fantastic or Singularity School. His very first poem, called "The Weeper," shows how he treated even sacred subjects:—
"Hail, sister springs!
Parents of silver-forded rills,
Ever-bubbling things!