Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/189

Rh But it is only on occasions that he approaches this level. Vaughan was a mystic, not as Donne from too intense and subtle reflection, but from visitings of

"that blessed mood                    In which the burthen of the mystery                     Is lightened";

and under the influence of that mood he apprehended the divine in simpler and more enduring symbols than the correctly Anglican Herbert or the ecstatically Catholic Crashaw—

"On some gilded cloud or flower                   My gazing soul would dwell an hour,                    And in those weaker glories spy                    Some shadows of eternity."

A more ardent temperament than either Herbert's or Vaughan's, a more soaring and glowing lyrical genius, belonged to Richard Crashaw (1613-1649). The son of a Puritan preacher who denounced the Pope as Antichrist, Crashaw at Cambridge came under the influence of that powerful wave of reaction of which the Laudian movement was only a symptom. His artistic temperament felt the charm of church music and architecture, and his ardent disposition responded, like the Dutch Vondel's, to the Catholic glorification of love as well as faith, the devotion to Christ and the Virgin of the martyr and the saint. He read Italian and Spanish, and was infected by the taste for what one might call the religious confectionery of which Marino's poems are full. His Epigrammata Sacra (1634) elaborate with great cleverness and point