Crashaw the Mystic

...The poet has, however, Thompson conconstitutionally afraid of many-syllabled words and high-sound- tinues, a "human and lover-like tenderness which informs his ing platitudes, I resort to a cruel subterfuge...

...Perhaps I do not well to speak for my fellow- need it: he reaches God, not by means of beautiful things, martyrs of the classroom, but I, at least, wait with fluttering but in spite of them...

...if not religiously inspired, can never be satisfied but by "the full kingdom of that final he may see it as a lily in a sable sea, or as a goddess...

...Seeing ture and his place as a poet...

...he has not pathos, nor warm here...

...It is a thing was old enough to have been softened by time, that kindliest which gives birth to deeds rather than to mere words...

...he does not every turn...

...It is absolutely persecuted during his youthful quest for the truth that the the most natural thing in the world, since man is by nature Catholic Church alone could give him, and dying before he bound to love God and communicate with Him...

...Contemplation is above all things away as a childish whim the story of her setting out to seek active...

...But he did far more than this...

...Herein is, I uninterrupted contemplation of God even in this life-an think, the perfect expression of mysticism...

...Utter selflessness is the prime characIn the dedication to a hymn to Saint Teresa, Richard teristic of the true mystic...

...And almost invariably the student does find out that household emotions is to be found in his life as lived among mysticism is the intercourse of the Christlike soul with God...

...and yet the state that is the goal of quietism makes martyrdom at the age of six...

...The imagist, if a Catholic, breathless moment the gates of paradise and making us aware will see the moon as an image of the Host held in the mon- that in us, too, are "brim-filled bowls of fierce desire" that strance of the diamond-studded sky...

...Such indeed it is, opening for one the moon as a subject for a poem...

...I-almost sacred poems, differentiating them from the conventional style literally-hurl volumes of Crashaw and Thompson at the of English sacred poetry, with its solemn aloofness from celesoffending questioner, and issue the command to read and find tial things...

...Not the sword of the heathen but the dart the death to self which opens the way to life in God...

...Such is the vision of Richard Crashaw heart the inevitable question of some struggling student of the the poet...

...The reason why Crashaw lacked the human and out...

...Being kindly race of men...

...of Divine Love aflame must sheath itself in her soul's sweet Crashaw's mysticism was sane and true because it was learned mansion, till, like incense burned and wasted by too hot a fire from the best manual of mysticism ever written, the Gospels...

...not so Crashaw, for he knew reason impossible, substituting for reason the passive reception that it is "love, not yeares or limbs that can make the martyr...

...Herein The distilled essence of Crashaw's mysticism is in the closis the exact difference between Crashaw and the modern im- ing lines of his hymn to Saint Teresa, The Flaming Heart, agist poet, who is concerned only with exteriors...

...I am glad I need not betray myself human and household emotions...

...The kiss" that seizes the parting soul and seals her God's...

...self, he lived in God...

...With an even more agitated mind I await the ques- love, nor any of the qualities which come home to the natural tion of the student of poetry, "Just what is mysticism...

...With a nine good sheep to browse sweetly and safely on the hillside heart burning with unsatisfied desires for sympathetic and while He sought in dangerous places for the one that had gone understanding love, the poet could but throw himself wildly astray, the Christlike person must spend himself for others as and abandonedly into the Arms and upon the Heart that well...

...and the Little Flower are mystics of the first degree, yet every Crashaw's love of God was the energizing kind which makes one of them is an even greater apostle...

...through things is an ability that belongs to the mystic...

...The moon is in his way...

...July 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 243 CRASHAW THE MYSTIC realist will see the moon as it is, a beautiful thing to look at but in reality the deadest thing in the universe...

...into perfuming clouds," it shall "exhale to heaven at last in Crashaw was a universal scholar, versed in Hebrew, Greek, a resolving sigh...

...Suppose the which George Saintsbury calls a "marvelous rocket of song in imagist and the mystic, the realist and the idealist all look on the heaven of poetry...

...Quietism is, then, a negation of mysticism...

...Quietism is just another name for Crashaw pays tribute to her "angelicall height of speculation" lazy selfishness...

...of infused light...

...One needs but re- men spend themselves for God...

...she It means the death of the soul This is not the death for was to be "love's victime," who must "dy a death more mys- which Crashaw pleads in so many of his poems...

...Saint Bernard, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, always responds to the feeblest love...

...Reared in the home of a Mysticism is not to be confused with ecstasy and miracu- Puritan clergyman-his father-misunderstood, neglected, and lous power and other things supernatural...

...Then, she is to be greeted there by God, Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and he was accomplished in music, His Mother, angels, saints, souls she has saved, "good workes drawing, engraving, and painting, but I think it safe to say which went before," old woes and pains now smiling on her...

...Others might laugh utterly impossible thing...

...men rather than in his mysticism...

...that he knew his Bible better than he knew anything else...

...The true mystic, though himself sinless as a rule, can be If he had written only the Epigrammata Sacra and the Steps unfailingly tender toward the sinful for the reason that he to the Temple he would have proved his saturation in Scripcan look through the sinner to a Cross on a hill...

...It of physicians of human heartbreaks, Crashaw had little opporremembers that since the divine Shepherd left the ninety-and- tunity to acquire the human and household emotions...

...novel, "Just which are the differences among realism, idealism, Francis Thompson says that Crashaw "is no poet of the and romanticism...

...Though he complained that member the crusades, the reform of the Carmelites, and the the blessed eyes of God bred in him such desire that he died unceasing labors of her who is to spend her heaven in doing "in love's delicious fire," he could never be justly accused of good on earth, and one will understand that mysticism is just quietism, for while God thus sweetly slew him, dead to himanother name for Catholic unselfishness...

...The quietist makes perfection to consist of and her "masculine courage of performance...

...he asks rather ticall and high...

...The idealist By SISTER M. ELEANORE will see the moon as a lovely expression of God's power, which T HOSE of us teachers who are interested in increasing the ought to lift man's heart to God...

...The mystic, while the learning of our students rather than in awing them by imagist looks beside the moon, the realist looks at, and the a constant display of our own sometimes feel like retreating in idealist looks into it, looks through the calm face of the moon terror before the array of " 'isms" that confronts us at almost into the Face of God...

...God saved her from her desire only to satisfy His own...