The main feature of Herbert's poetry is the religious love lyric, the cry of the individual soul to God. This is the mystical quality in his verse, which is quieter and far less musical than Crashaw's, but which possesses at times a tender fragrance and freshness, as in the little poem _Love_.
Christopher Harvey, the friend of Izaak Walton and the admirer of Herbert, has in his poems some lines which breathe almost as rapturous a passion of spiritual love as anything in Crashaw. Such is his epigram on the _Insatiableness of the Heart_.
The whole round world is not enough to fill The heart's three corners; but it craveth still. Onely the Trinity, that made it, can Suffice the vast-triangled heart of man.[70]
Or again, in a later epigram in the same poem (_The School of the Heart_), he puts the main teaching of Plotinus and of all mystics into four pregnant lines--
My busie stirring heart, that seekes the best, Can find no place on earth wherein to rest; For God alone, the Author of its blisse, Its only rest, its onely center is.
But it is Crashaw who, of these three, shares in fullest measure the passion of the great Catholic mystics, and more especially of St Teresa, whom he seems almost to have worshipped. His hymn to her "name and honor" is one of the great English poems; it burns with spiritual flame, it soars with noble desire. Near the beginning of it, Crashaw has, in six simple lines, pictured the essential mystic attitude of action, not necessarily or consciously accompanied by either a philosophy or a theology. He is speaking of Teresa's childish attempt to run away and become a martyr among the Moors.
She never undertook to know What death with love should have to doe; Nor has she e're yet understood Why to shew love, she should shed blood Yet though she cannot tell you why, She can LOVE, and she can DY.
Spiritual love has never been more rapturously sung than in this marvellous hymn. Little wonder that it haunted Coleridge's memory, and that its deep emotion and rich melody stimulated his poet's ear and imagination to write _Christabel_.[71] Crashaw's influence also on Patmore, more especially on the _Sponsa Dei_, as well as later on Francis Thompson, is unmistakable.