Richard Crashaw

Richard Crashaw (c. 1613 – 21 August 1649) English poet, styled "the divine," was part of the Seventeenth-century Metaphysical School of poets.

Title page of Crashaw's Steps to the Temple (1646) which was published during Crashaw's exile

Quotes

• Love's great artillery.
  • Prayer L18

• The conscious water saw its God and blushed.
  • Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634). Translated by John Dryden from Crashaw's Latin original: "Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit (The modest Nymph saw the god, and blushed)", Complete works of Richard Crashaw (1872), edited by Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 2, p. 96.

• A happy soul, that all the way
  To heaven hath a summer’s day.
  • In Praise of Lessius’s Rule of Health, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• The modest front of this small floor,
  Believe me, reader, can say more
  Than many a braver marble can,—
  “Here lies a truly honest man!”
  • Epitaph upon Mr. Ashton, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Thou water turn'st to wine, fair friend of life;
  Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of Thy reign,
  Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife,
  And so turns wine to water back again.
  • Steps to the Temple, To Our Lord upon the Water Made Wine; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 516.

Wishes for the Supposed Mistress

Quotes reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Whoe’er she be,
  That not impossible she,
  That shall command my heart and me.

• Where’er she lie,
  Locked up from mortal eye,
  In shady leaves of destiny.

• Days that need borrow
  No part of their good morrow
  From a fore-spent night of sorrow.

• Life that dares send
  A challenge to his end,
  And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend!

• Sydneian showers
  Of sweet discourse, whose powers
  Can crown old Winter’s head with flowers.