'Her pure and eloquent soul
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.'
I have much the same conception of Crashaw's thinking. It was so emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling. Bare intellect, 'pure' (= naked) thought, you rarely come on in his Poems. The thought issues forth from (in old-fashioned phrase) the heart, and its subtlety is something unearthly even to awfulness. Let the reader give hours to the study of the composition entitled 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord God, a Hymn svng as by the three Kings,' and 'In the holy Nativity of ovr Lord God.' Their depth combined with elevation, their grandeur softening into loveliness, their power with pathos, their awe bursting into rapture, their graciousness and lyrical music, their variety and yet unity, will grow in their study. As always, there is a solid substratum of original thought in them; and the thinking, as so often in Crashaw, is surcharged with emotion. If the thought may be likened to fire, the praise, the rapture, the yearning may be likened to flame leaping up from it. Granted that, as in fire and flame, there are coruscations and jets of smoke, yet is the smoke that 'smoak' of which Chudleigh in his Elegy for Donne sings:
'Incense of love's and fancie's holy smoak;'
or, rather, that 'smoke' which filled the House to the vision of Isaiah (vi. 4). The hymn 'To the admirable Sainte Teresa,' and the 'Apologie' for it, and related 'Flaming Heart,' and 'In the glorious Assvmption of our Blessed Lady,' are of the same type. Take this from the 'Flaming Heart' (vol. i. p. 155):
'Leaue her ... the flaming heart:
Leaue her that, and thou shalt leaue her
Not one loose shaft, but Loue's whole quiver.
For in Loue's feild was neuer found
A nobler weapon than a wovnd.
Loue's passiues are his actiu'st part,
The wounded is the wounding heart.
. . . . . . .
Liue here, great heart; and loue and dy and kill,
And bleed and wound; and yeild and conquer still.'
His homage to the Virgin is put into words that pass the bounds which we Protestants set to the 'blessed among women' in her great renown, and even while a Protestant Crashaw fell into what we must regard as the strange as inexplicable forgetfulness that it is The Man, not The Child, who is our ever-living High-Priest 'within the veil,' and that not in His mother's bosom, but on the Throne of sculptured light, is His place. Still, you recognise that the homage to the Virgin-mother is to the Divine Son through her, and through her in fine if also mistaken humility. 'Mary' is the Muse of Crashaw; the Lord Jesus his 'Lord' and hers. I would have the reader spend willing time, in slowly, meditatively reading the whole of our Poet's sacred Verse, to note how the thinking thus thrills into feeling, and feeling into rapture—the rapture of adoration. It is miraculous how he finds words wherewith to utter his most subtle and vanishing emotion. Sometimes there is a daintiness and antique richness of wording that you can scarcely equal out of the highest of our Poets, or only in them. Some of his images from Nature are scarcely found anywhere else. For example, take this very difficult one of ice, in the Verse-Letter to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. p. 298, ll. 21-26), 'persuading' her no longer to be the victim of her doubts:
'So, when the Year takes cold, we see
Poor waters their own prisoners be;
Fetter'd and lock'd-up fast they lie
In a cold self-captivity.
Th' astonish'd Nymphs their Floud's strange fate deplore,
To find themselves their own severer shoar.'
Young is striking in his use of the ice-metaphor:
'in Passion's flame
Hearts melt; but melt like ice, soon harder froze.'
(Night-Thoughts, N. II. l. 522-3.)