Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 015.jpg

Rh than did the pious young priest; nor can we resist smiling a little at his ingenious recasting of Master Dyer's "Fancy," wherein the subject is made to mourn a lack of grace instead of love! But the constancy and depth of this devotion, and the delicacy of imagination which accompanied it, both charm and coerce our admiration. They are the characteristics of his prose as well as his verse—they are the dominant, unmistakable notes of his personality. And if, in his own words, his work be "coarse in respect of others' exquisite labours," we shall not easily forget the circumstances which called it into being: the "evident fact," to quote Mr. Saintsbury, "that the author thought of nothing else than of merely cultivating the Muses."

Two obvious defects to be found in Southwell's works are extravagance of metaphor and an almost monotonous habit of playing upon words; for both of which, however, the age must be held responsible. When one recalls the years during which he wrote—the vogue of the sonnet-sequences, of Euphues, Arcadia, and the Faerie Queene—it is understood that "conceits" were in the very air. Sir Philip Sidney himself, we remember, has somewhere compared a white horse speckled with red to "a few strawberries scattered in a dish of cream!" And the fundamental merit of Father Southwell's poetry has ever been recognised by the best critics, his literary influence being to-day more and more appreciated. This influence is very manifest in the poems of Richard Crashaw; and the lines from Scorn Not the Least—

find an echo in Blake's Tiger. "As a whole," summarises Dr. Grosart, "his poetry is healthy