architecture is his own'; in the second stanza of Easter Day:

Of all the Gloryes Make Noone gay
This is the Morne.
This rocke buds forth the fountaine of the streames
of Day.

In joyes white Annals live this houre,
When life was borne,
No cloud scoule on his radiant lids no tempest lowre,

or these from Sospetto d'Herode:

That the Great Angell-blinding light should shrinke
His blaze, to shine in a poore Shepheards eye.
That the unmeasur'd God so low should sinke,
As Pris'ner in a few poore Rags to lye . . .
. . . That a vile Manger his low Bed should prove,
Who in a Throne of stars Thunders above.

That hee whom the Sun serves, should faintly peepe
Through clouds of Infant flesh: that hee the old
Eternall Word should bee a Child, and weepe.
That hee who made the fire, should feare the cold . . .

This poem, Crashaw's translation of the first canto of
Marino's La Strage degli Innocenti, is far more striking in
concrenteness of imagery and atmospheric detail than its
original. Here especially--in the mellifluous cadences,
crowding personifications, and above all in the use of
sensuous richness to communicate moral sentiment and
spiritual meaning--Crashaw's debt to Spenser is plain. The
pictorial and musical qualities of his verse may have owed
something also to his natural talents for 'Musicke, Drawing,
Limning, Graving' mentioned in the Preface to Steps to the
Temple. (It is thought that at least two engravings in Carmen
Deo Nostro were his own illustrations.) With his fragrant
showers dropping 'a delicious dew of spices', his perfumed
and balmy air, his lambs in the 'laughing meads' and sun-
gilded fleece of grazing flocks, his April flowers and 'pure

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