Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/191

Rh in religious poetry is better represented by Drummond's sacred sonnets.

But if Crashaw's taste in conceits is at times worse than Marino's, his lyrical inspiration is stronger, his spiritual ecstasies more ardent. There is more of Vondel than Marino in the atmosphere of his religious poetry. The northern temperament vibrates with a fuller music. His hymn, On the Glorious Assumption, is written in the same exalted strain as Vondel's dedication of the Brieven der Heilige Maeghden, but Vondel's style is simpler and more masculine. Crashaw's fire is too often coloured—"happy fireworks" is the epithet he applies to his beloved Saint Theresa's writings—but its glow is unmistakable, and occasionally, as in the closing lines of The Flaming Heart, it is purified by its own ardour.

A devoted Anglican like Herbert and Vaughan, but a bolder quester after the divine as revealed not in Church creeds and symbols but in nature and in the heart of man, was Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), rector of Credinhill in Herefordshire, and chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman. In his lifetime Traherne published nothing beyond a contribution, entitled Roman Forgeries, to Anglican controversy, and a Christian Ethics, which was in the press at the time of his death. It was left to Mr Bertram Dobell in the present century to make public the ardent and mystical poems, which had been preserved in manuscript for more than two centuries, and were on the eve of perishing.

Traherne's poetry glows with an ecstasy as ardent as Crashaw's, but more intellectual and mystical than