[30] The 'Epiphanie' has some of the grandest things of Crashaw, and things so original in the thought and wording as not easily to be paralleled in other Poets: _e.g._ '_Dread Sweet_' (l. 236), and the superb 'Something a _brighter shadow_, Sweet, of thee' (l. 250). The most Crashaw-like of early 'Epiphany' or Christmas Hymns is that of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, from which I take these lines:
'Awake, my soul, and come away! Put on thy best array; Least if thou longer stay, Thou lose some minitts of so blest a day. Goe run, And bid good-morrow to the sun; Welcome his safe return To Capricorn; And that great Morne Wherein a God was borne, Whose story none can tell, But He whose every word's a miracle.'
(Our ed. of Bp. Taylor's Poems, pp. 22-3.)
_En passant_, since our edition of Bishop Taylor's Poems was issued we have discovered that a 'Christmas Anthem or Carol by T.P.,' which appeared in James Clifford's 'Divine Services and Anthems' (1663), is Bishop Taylor's Hymn. This we learn from 'The Musical Times,' Feb. 1st, 1871, in a paper on Clifford's book. Criticising the words as by an unknown T.P.--ignorant that he was really criticising Bp. Jeremy Taylor--the (I suppose) learned Writer thus appreciatively writes of the grand Hymn and these passionate yearning words: 'Who, for instance, could seriously sing in church such stuff as the following Christmas Anthem or Carol, by T.P.? which Mr. William Childe (not yet made Doctor) had set to music.' Ahem! And so on, in stone-eyed, stone-eared stupidity.--Of modern celebrations I name as worthy of higher recognition than it has received the following 'Hymn to the Week above every Week,' by Thomas H. Gill; Lon., Mudie, 1844 (pp. 24). There is no little of the rich quaint matter and manner of our elder Singers in this fine Poem.
[32] Like Macaulay in his History of England (1st edition), Dr. Macdonald by an oversight speaks of Crashaw as 'expelled from _Oxford_,' instead of Cambridge (cf. our vol. i. p. 32).
[33] The Letter of Pope to Mr. Henry Cromwell is in all the editions of his Correspondence. Willmott (as before) also gives it _in extenso_. Of The Weeper Pope says: 'To confirm what I have said, you need but look into his first poem of The Weeper, where the 2d, 4th, 6th, 14th, 21st stanzas are as sublimely dull as the 7th, 8th, 9th, 16th, 17th, 20th, and 23d stanzas of the same copy are soft and pleasing. And if these last want anything, it is an easier and more unaffected expression. The remaining thoughts in that poem might have been spared, being either but repetitions, or very trivial and mean. And by this example one may guess at all the rest to be like this; a mixture of tender gentle thoughts and suitable expressions, of forced and inextricable conceits, and of needless fillers-up of the rest,' &c. &c. 'Sweet' is the loftiest epithet Pope uses for Crashaw, and that in the knowledge of the 'Suspicion of Herod.' In The Weeper he passes some of the very finest things. In his Abelard and Eloisa he incorporates felicities from Crashaw's 'Alexias' within inverted commas; but elsewhere is not very careful to mark indebtedness.