Again: the sun is seen by the Tempter to
Make proud the ruby portalls of the East;' (st. xvi.)
for 'la Reggia Oriental.' Crashaw has the same vivid fancy in the Hymn for Epiphany:
'Aurora shall set ope
Her ruby casements.'
Finally, to show that even where our Translator keeps closest to the original, he yet gives the creative touches of which I have already spoken, read his st. v. beside this literal translation:
'Under the abysses, at the very core of the world,
In the central point of the universe,
Within the bowers of the darkest deep,
There stands the fiendly perverse Spirit:
With sharp thongs an impure group
Binds him with a hundred snakes athwart:
With such bonds girds him for ever,
The great champion who conquered HIM in Paradise.'
Thus we might go over the entire poem, and everywhere we should gather proofs that he was himself all he conceived in his splendid portraiture of the true Poet's genius:
'no rapture makes it live
Drest in the glorious madnesse of a Muse,
Whose feet can walke the Milky Way,
Her starry throne, and hold up an exalted arm
To lift me from my lazy urn and climbe
Upon the stoopèd shoulders of old Time,
And trace eternity.' (vol. i. p. 238.)[38]
Fully to estimate Crashaw's own grander imaginative faculty the Reader must study here the now-first-printed and very Miltonic poems on Apocalypse xii. 7 (Vol. II. pp. 231-3) and 'Christe, veni' (ib. pp. 223-5). It is profoundly to be regretted that our Poet should have limited himself to Book I. of the 'Strage degli Innocenti,' viz. 'Sospetto d'Herode.' Book VII. especially, 'Della Gerusalemme Distruta,' would have demanded all his powers. The entire poem was 'done in English,' and it is 'done' (by T.R. 1675).