Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
Or in Crashaw’s celebrated line about the miracle at Cana:
Nympha pudica deum vidit et ernbuit,
Englished by Dryden as
The conscious water saw its God and blushed.
But except in such rarely felicitous instances, this manner of writing is deplorable. Some of its most flagrant offenses are still notorious. Crashaw’s description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes as:
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
Or Carew’s lines on Maria Wentworth: