Born, in London, July [?] 1591; baptized, 24 Aug. Probably educated at Westminster School and at St. John’s Coll., Camb. Removed to Trinity Hall, 1616; B.A., 1617; M.A., 1620. Rector of Dean Prior, Devonshire, 2 Oct. 1629 to 1647. Deprived of living, 1647; returned to London. Restored to living, 24 Aug. 1662. Died, at Dean Prior, Oct. 1674; buried in Dean Prior church, 15 Oct. Works: “King Obron’s Feast” (anon., in “A Description of the King and Queene of Fayries”), 1635; “His Mistris Shade” (anon.; in Shakespeare’s “Poems”), 1640; “Hesperides” (with “Noble Numbers”), 1648; Poems in “Lacrymæ Musarum,” 1649; Poems in “Witt’s Recreations,” 1650. Collected Works: ed. by Lord Dundrennan (2 vols.), 1823; by Grosart (3 vols.), 1876; by A. W. Pollard, 1891; by Saintsbury (2 vols.), 1893.

Personal

  Being in Devonshire during the last summer, we took an opportunity of visiting Dean Prior, for the purpose of making some inquiries concerning Herrick, who, from the circumstance of having been vicar of that parish (where he is still talked of as a poet, a wit, and a hater of the county), for twenty years, might be supposed to have left some unrecorded memorials of his existence behind him. We found many persons in the village who could repeat some of his lines…. The person, however, who knows more of Herrick than all the rest of the neighbourhood, we found to be a poor woman in the ninety-ninth year of her age, named Dorothy King. She repeated to us, with great exactness, five of his “Noble Numbers,” among which was the beautiful Litany. These she had learned from her mother, who was apprenticed to Herrick’s successor in the vicarage. She called them her prayers, which, she said, she was in the habit of putting up in bed, whenever she could not sleep: and she therefore began the Litany at the second stanza,

“When I lie within my bed,” &c.

Another of her midnight orisons was the poem beginning

	“Every night thou dost me fright,
	And keep mine eyes from sleeping,” &c.

She had no idea that these poems had ever been printed, and could not have read them if she had seen them. She is in possession of few traditions as to the person, manners, and habits of life of the poet; but in return, she has a whole budget of anecdotes respecting his ghost; and these she details with a careless but serene gravity, which one would not willingly discompose by any hints at a remote possibility of their not being exactly true. Herrick, she says, was a bachelor, and kept a maid-servant, as his poems, indeed, discover; but she adds, what they do not discover, that he also kept a pet-pig, which he taught to drink out of a tankard. And this important circumstance, together with a tradition that he one day threw his sermon at the congregation, with a curse for their inattention, forms almost the sum total of what we could collect of the poet’s life.

  This fine old fellow, this joyous heart, who lived to be eighty-three, in spite of “dull Devonshire” and the bad times, wrote almost as much as Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling united, and how much there is in his weed-choked garden, which is comparable with their best compositions! How little we know of him! how scantily he has been realized to us! Could we but raise up for a summer afternoon the Devonshire which he lived in, and the people with whom he mixed or summon the ghost of faithful Prudence Baldwin, we might be furnished with inspiration to do something better than the bare sketch which follows.

	Rare Old Herrick, the Cavalier Vicar
	Of pleasant Dean Prior by Totnes Town—
	Rather too wont in foaming liquor
	The cares of those troublous times to drown
	Of wicked wit by no means chary—
	Of ruddy lips not at all afraid;
	If you gave him milk in a Devonshire dairy,
	He’d probably kiss the dairymaid.

  Being ejected by Cromwell from his church living in 1648, he dropped his title of “Reverend” to assume that of “Esquire,” and published a volume to which he gave the title of “Hesperides; or, the Works both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq.” Doubtless the “Esquire” was accepted by the public, as well as by himself, as more appropriate than “Reverend” would have been to the character of the lyrics, some part of which he yet seems rather arrogantly to call “Divine.”

  This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus. It was such a figure as the artist would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures.

  Mr. Gosse, for example, assures us that Julia really walked the earth, and even gives us some details of her mundane pilgrimage; other critics smile, and shake their heads, and doubt. It matters not; she lives, and she will continue to live when we who dispute the matter lie voiceless in our graves. The essence of her personality lingers on every page where Herrick sings of her. His verse is heavy with her spicy perfumes, glittering with her many-colored jewels, lustrous with the shimmer of her silken petticoats. Her very shadow, her sighs, distills sweet odors on the air, and draws him after her, faint with their amorous languor. How lavish she is with her charms, this woman who neither thinks nor suffers; who prays, indeed, sometimes, with great serenity, and dips her snowy finger in the font of blessed water, but whose spiritual humors pale before the calm vigor of her earthly nature! How kindly, how tranquil, how unmoved, she is; listening with the same slow smile to her lover’s fantastic word-play, to the fervid conceits with which he beguiles the summer idleness, and to the frank and sudden passion with which he conjures her, “dearest of thousands,” to close his eyes when death shall summon him, to shed some true tears above the sod, to clasp forever the book in which he writes her name! How gently she would have fulfilled these last sad duties had the discriminating fates called her to his bier; how fragrant the sighs she would have wafted in that darkened chamber; how sincere the temperate sorrow for a remediable loss! And then, out into the glowing sunlight, where life is sweet, and the world exults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, and, underneath the scattered primrose blossoms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their graves.

  The same sensuous feeling which made him invest his friends with the perfume of Juno or Isis, sing of their complexions as roses overspread with lawn, compare their lips to cherries, and praise their silver feet, had also its other side. The unlucky wights who incurred the poet’s wrath were treated in a fashion equally offensive to good taste and good manners. Nor are these gruesome epigrams the only apples in the garden of Herrick’s “Hesperides” which have affronted the taste of modern readers. The epigrams indeed, if apples at all, are rather the dusty apples of the Dead Sea than the pleasant fruit of the Western Isles; but Herrick’s “Epithalamia,” odes whose sustained splendour gives them a high rank among his poems, because they sing of other marriage-rites than those of rice and slipper, have also tended to restrict the circle of his readers in an age which prides itself on its modesty. Hence it has come about that while the names of the lovely ladies of the poet’s imagination,—Julia, Dianeme, Electra, Perilla—are widely known, those of the men and women whom Herrick treasured as his friends are all but forgotten.

  It seems likely that Perilla and her fair companions were actually known to Herrick in London, and were then made the topic of many a gallant verse; and that after he sailed away to the West he continued to write to their memory as though they were actually present; that, in fact, the goddesses he was never weary of worshipping were, to a large extent, abstractions and ideals. And when in the quiet of his little parsonage, or in a sunny Devonshire meadow bright with wild flowers, his fancy coined some musical verse in honour of his ideal love, his memory would glide quickly back and dwell longingly on her prototype of flesh and blood whom he had known and loved in former years; and, cut off from all the noises and all the rivalries of the town, it must have seemed to him that he was thinking of another Robert Herrick who had lived long ago.

  Whether or not the bovine features in Marshall’s engraving are a libel on the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment…. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artist lends an air of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his sermon at the heads of his drowsy parishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has the aspect of one meditating assault and battery. To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiability of the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings…. I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections.

Hesperides, 1648

	I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
	Of April, May, of June and July-flowers;
	I sing of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
	Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes;
	I write of youth, of love, and have access
	By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
	I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece,
	Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris;
	I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
	How roses first came red and lilies white.
	I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
	The Court of Mab and of the Fairie King;
	I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall,
	Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

	Ships lately from the islands came,
	With wines, thou never heard’st by name.
	Montefiasco, Frontiniac,
	Vernaccio, and that old sack
	Young Herric took to entertaine
	The muses in a sprightly vein.

	An then Flaccus Horace,
	He was but a sowr-ass,
	And good for nothing but Lyricks,
	There’s but One to be found
	In all English ground
	Writes as well;—who is hight Robert Herick.

  Herrick published his poems at an age when youth and inexperience could not be urged in extenuation of the blemishes which they presented. The author was fifty-seven years old when the “Hesperides” issued from the press, replete with beauties and excellencies, and at the same time abounding in passages of outrageous grossness. The title was perhaps rather apt to mislead, for besides golden apples, this garden assuredly contained many rank tares and poisonous roots. It would scarcely suffice to plead the freedom and breadth of speech customary among all classes and with both sexes at that period. Some share of the blame must, beyond question, be laid to Herrick’s voluptuousness of temperament, and not very cleanly ardour of imagination; yet, after all deductions which it is possible to make, what a noble salvage remains! Enough beauty, wit, nay piety, to convert even the prudish to an admiration of the genius which shines transparent through all.

  The “Hesperides” is so rich in jewelry, that the most careless selection can hardly be unsatisfactory. Yet being so rich, there might have been more independent taste. One is led to ask how much of popular favouritism even in literature is, like fashion in clothes, due to dictation of the purveyors.

  Herrick alone, with imperturbable serenity, continued to pipe out his pastoral ditties, and crown his head with daffodils, when England was torn to pieces with the most momentous struggle for liberty in her annals. To the poetic student he is, therefore, of especial interest, as a genuine specimen of an artist, pure and simple. Herrick brought out the “Hesperides” a few months before the King was beheaded, and people were invited to listen to little madrigals upon Julia’s stomacher at the singularly inopportune moment when the eyes of the whole nation were bent on the unprecedented phenomenon of the proclamation of an English republic. To find a parallel to such unconsciousness we must come down to our own time, and recollect that Théophile Gautier took occasion of the seige of Paris to revise and republish his Emaux et Camées.

  In the quiet of his parsonage, the music of his life found utterance in every mood. His whole mind expressed itself, animal and spiritual. In the texture of his book he evidently meant to show the warp and woof of life. He aimed at effects of contrast that belonged to the true nature of man, in whom, as in the world at large, “the strawberry grows underneath the nettle,” and side by side with promptings of the flesh, spring up the aspirations of the spirit. Even the dainty fairy pieces written under influence of the same fashion that caused Shakespeare to describe Queen Mab and Drayton to write his Nymphidia, even such pieces of his, written in earlier days, Herrick sprinkled about his volume in fragments. He would not make his nosegay with the flowers of each sort bunched together in so many lumps. There is truth in the close contact of a playful sense of ugliness with the most delicate perception of all forms of beauty. Herrick’s “epigrams” on running eyes and rotten teeth, and the like, are such exaggerations as may often have tumbled out spontaneously, in the course of playful talk, and if they pleased him well enough were duly entered in his book. In a healthy mind, this whimsical sense of deformity may be but the other side of a fine sense of beauty.

  That the “Hesperides” is the most typical single book of the class and kind there can be little doubt, though there may be higher and rarer touches in others. Its bulk, its general excellence in its own kind, make it exhibit the combined influences of Donne and Jonson (which, as was pointed out earlier, tell upon, and to some extent account for, this lyrical outburst) better than any other single volume. And long as Herrick had to wait for his public (it must be confessed that, though the times do not seem to have in the least chained the poet’s tongue, they did much to block his hearers’ ears), there is now not much difference of opinion in general points, however much there may be in particulars, about the poetical value of “The Mad Maid’s Song” and “To Daffodils,” of the “Night Piece to Julia” and “To the Virgins,” of the “Litany” and “The White Island.” Yet this book is only the most popular and coherent collection among an immense mass of verse, all informed by the most singular and attractive quality.

	Yellow and frayed and torn; but mark within,
	The sparkling rhyme
	That, like a dimple in an old dame’s chin,
	Laughs out at Time!

Noble Numbers, 1648

  Herrick’s sacred poems … have often much merit. We cannot doubt their sincerity. But they are mostly strained, and show Herrick ill at ease. They are strangely disfigured with conceits, and the best of them are half secular.

  Of the religious poems the already-mentioned “Litany,” while much the most familiar, is also far the best. There is nothing in English verse to equal it as an expression of religious fear; while there is also nothing in English verse to equal the “Thanksgiving,” also well known, as an expression of religious trust.

  The religious pieces grouped under the title of “Noble Numbers” distinctly associate themselves with Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very few of them are “born of the royal blood.” They lack the inspiration and magic of his secular poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the absolute soundness of Herrick’s mind at all times. The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he may read Herrick’s poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced.

General

  One of the Scholars of Apollo of the middle Form, yet something above George Withers, in a pretty Flowry and Pastoral Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips.

  These two books of poetry made him much admired in the time when they were published, especially by the generous and boon loyalists, among whom he was numbred as a sufferer.

  It appears from the effects of her inspiration, that Prue was but indifferently qualified for a tenth muse.

  Had Herrick adopted any arrangement or classification for his poetry, it would probably have experienced a kinder fate. The reader would then have had the opportunity of choosing the department most congenial to his taste, and without incurring the risk of being seduced into the perusal of matter offensive to his feelings. At present, so injudiciously are the contents of his volume disposed, and so totally divested of order and propriety, that it would almost seem the poet wished to pollute and bury his best effusions in a mass of nonsense and obscenity. Nine persons out of ten who should casually dip into the collection, would, in all probability, after glancing over a few trifling epigrams, throw it down with indignation, little apprehending it contained many pieces of a truly moral and pathetic, and of an exquisitely rural and descriptive, strain.

  Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite and thread-bare. But neither is he likely to become so. He is a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. From his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary instead of a poet.

  A coarse-minded and beastly writer, whose dunghill, when the few flowers that grew therein had been transplanted, ought never to have been disturbed. Those flowers indeed are beautiful and perennial; but they should have been removed from the filth and ordure in which they are embedded.

  Without the exuberant gayety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults of his age are sometimes apparent: though he is not often obscure, he runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into occasional pedantry. He has his conceits and false thoughts; but these are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams), which may be praised without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry.

  The Ariel of poets, sucking “where the bee sucks” from the roseheart of nature, and reproducing the fragrance idealized.

  As a loyalist and sufferer in the cause, there can be no doubt that Herrick was popular with the Cavalier party, and that his poems were received with the favour they deserved by his contemporaries, for that they were popular must be inferred from the number of them which were set to music by Henry Lawes, Laniere, Wilson, and Ramsay; it is somewhat difficult to account for the seeming neglect which they experienced in after times.

  More than any eminent writer of that day, Herrick’s collection requires careful sifting; but there is so much fancy, so much delicacy, so much grace, that a good selection would well repay the publisher. Bits there are that are exquisite…. But his real delight was among flowers and bees, and nymphs and cupids; and certainly these graceful subjects were never handled more gracefully.

  He was an Anacreon or Catullus in holy orders, whiling away, at the ripe age of forty, the dulness of his Devonshire parsonage in such ditties as these:

“Much I know, of time is spent,” &c., &c.

… And so, in every other poem, he sings or sips his wine, with his arm round a Julia! What eyes, what lips, what a neck! and so on amorously, beyond all clerical limits. Like Anacreon, he is sweet, too, in light sensuous descriptions of physical nature…. There was, moreover, a tinge of amiable melancholy in his genius—the melancholy on which the Epicurean philosophy itself rests.

  It is an especial pleasure to write the name of Robert Herrick amongst the poets of religion, for the very act records that the jolly, careless Anacreon of the church, with his head and heart crowded with pleasures, threw down at length his wine-cup, tore the roses from his head, and knelt in the dust.

  Making due allowance of the time when Herrick’s verses were written, his temptation to suit the taste of courtiers and kings, his volumes contain much admirable poetry, tempered with religious devotion. He wrote sweet and virtuous verse, with lines here and there that should not have been written. But he is an antedote to the vice in his lines, and may well have place in the scholar’s library with Donne, Daniel, Cowley, Shakespeare, and contemporaries.

  Many of his compositions are, in the fullest sense of the term, trifles; others are at least exquisite trifles; some are not trifles, and are exquisite. After more than a century of neglect, ensuing upon their first ample popularity, Herrick’s writings have for years been kept freshened with a steady current of literary laudation—certainly not unjustified, so far as their finer qualities go, but tending a little to the indiscriminate.

  Beyond all dispute, the best of the early lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose verses are flushed with a joyous and tender spirit. He may be styled the Burns of his time, and was imbued with something of the reckless soul of the great north-countryman…. Flowers, music, woman, all these had their intense and several charms for him, and, strangely enough for a middle-aged clergyman, he was clearly an amorous and erotic poet.

  Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls who drink of him, Herrick offers “securos latices.” He is conspicuously free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no overstrain, no spasmodic cry, no wire-drawn analysis or sensational rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary inspiration, no mannered archaism:—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,—the only genuine note,—of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to “please now, and please for long.”

  Among the English pastoral poets, Herrick takes an undisputed precedence, and as a lyrist generally he is scarcely excelled, except by Shelley. No other writer of the seventeenth century approached him in abundance of song, in sustained exercise of the purely musical and intuitive gifts of poetry. Shakspeare, Milton, and perhaps Fletcher, surpassed him in the passion and elevated harmony of their best lyrical pieces, as they easily excelled him in the wider range of their genius and the breadth of their accomplishment. But while these men exercised their art in all its branches, Herrick confined himself very narrowly to one or two, and the unflagging freshness of his inspiration, flowing through a long life in so straitened a channel, enabled him to amass such a wealth of purely lyrical poetry as no other Englishman has produced. His level of performance was very high; he seems to have preserved all that he wrote, and the result is that we possess more than twelve hundred of his little poems, in at least one out of every three of which we may find something charming or characteristic. Of all the Cavalier lyrists Herrick is the only one that followed the bent of his genius undisturbed, and lived a genuine artist’s life.

  By a strange irony of fortune the only letters we possess from the genial and glowing pen of the great poet of the “Hesperides” are a series of plaintive notes to his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick; and we may gather from them that this amiable relative’s money paid for the piping of some of the most graceful lyrics in the English language.

  He sings well chiefly when he sings of love, but this love is not of the kind which inspires our greatest poets. He is enamoured with the accessories of a woman’s beauty—the colour of a ribbon, the flaunting of a ringlet, with “a careless shoe-string,” or the wave of a petticoat. The charms he sees in his mistress are likened to precious stones, and all the treasures of the lapidary are represented in his verse. There are few traces of tenderness in Herrick and none of passion; it is probable that every pretty girl he saw suggested a pretty fancy. To judge from his own saying, “no man at one time can be wise and love.” Herrick was not wise. If we may trust his verses, the poet was perennially in love, chiefly with Julia, “prime of all,” but warmly too with Anthea, Lucia, Corinna, and Perilla. Making love is in Herrick’s eyes a charming amusement, and the more love-making the more poetry. If Julia prove unkind, he can solace himself with Sappho; and if Sappho be perverse, some other mistress will charm him with her “pretty witchcrafts.”

  None of our English lyric poets has shown a more perfect sense of words and of their musical efficiency, none has united so exquisitely a classic sense of form to that impulsive tunefulness which we have come to consider as essentially English. In his earlier lyrics Herrick has perhaps more of this impulse, but it served him with the same youthful freshness to the last…. It is the way in which Herrick adds to and completes this natural lyrical impulse by the further grace of verse taught by the Latin verse-writers and their English disciples, that makes him so consummate an artist within his range…. There is magic in these lyrics, that indefinable quality, born of the spirit, which can alone avail in the end to make poetry live.

	Many suns have set and shone,
	Many springs have come and gone,
	Herrick, since thou sang’st of Wake,
	Morris-dance, and Barley-break;
	Many men have ceased from care,
	Many maidens have been fair,
	Since thou sang’st of Julia’s eyes,
	Julia’s lawns and tiffanies;
	Many things are past—but thou,
	Golden-Mouth, art singing now,
	Singing clearly as of old,
	And thy numbers are of gold.

  Divided, in the published form, into two classes: they may be divided, for purposes of poetical criticism, into three. The “Hesperides” (they are dated 1648, and the “Noble Numbers” or sacred poems 1647; but both appeared together) consist in the first place of occasional poems, sometimes amatory, sometimes not; in the second, of personal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any faculty of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary exercises—bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest attempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author’s best than the worst parts of Young’s “Odes” are from the best part of the “Night Thoughts.” It is impossible without producing specimens (which God forbid that any one who has a respect for Herrick, for literature, and for decency, should do) to show how bad they are. Let it only be said that if the worst epigram of Martial were stripped of Martial’s wit, sense, and literary form, it would be a kind of example of Herrick in this vein. In his two other veins, but for certain tricks of speech, it is almost impossible to recognise him for the same man. The secular vigour of the “Hesperides,” the spiritual vigour of the “Noble Numbers,” has rarely been equalled and never surpassed by any other writer.

  Herrick the inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!) in Devonshire. His Julia is the mortal of these “daughters of dreams and of stories,” whom poets celebrate; she has a certain opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and “rich eyes,” like Keats’s lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but a handsome English wench, with

	“A cuff neglectful and thereby
	Ribbons to flow confusedly;
	A winning wave, deserving note
	In the tempestuous petticoat.”

  There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable, things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England.

  In Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay; there is a morning light upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on the eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes; and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors.

  Herrick was practically forgotten until Nichols in 1796–7 drew attention to his poetry in the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Nichols was followed by Dr. Nathan Drake, who devoted some papers to Herrick in “Literary Hours;” and in 1810 Dr. Nott published “Select Poems from the ‘Hesperides,’” which was reviewed by Barron Field in the “Quarterly Review,” August 1810. In 1823 a complete edition, in two volumes, worthily edited by Thomas Maitland, lord Dundrennan, was published at Edinburgh, the “remainder” copies being issued (with a fresh title-page) by William Pickering in 1825. Pickering’s edition of 1846 contains a memoir by S. W. Singer; an edition by Mr. Edward Walford was published in 1859; Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt’s edition, 1869, 2 vols., has additional information of interest; and there is a valuable edition by Dr. Grosart, 3 vols., 1876. Selections from Herrick have been edited by Professor F. T. Palgrave and others.

  The passing of the glory of the world is continually filling his eyes with tears, which overflow in pearls that drop within his book. There are people—surely they must have lived in a monastery or a vacuum—who are always puzzled that the men who do these exquisite things in poetry should be sensuous, let us say sensual, in their lives; but apart from the many-sidedness of man, it is surely the sensuous man alone who is capable of these rich tearful moments. One must have lived to have lost, and Herrick lived as generously as Solomon, and his poems are a sort of Restoration Ecclesiastes, with less of the whine and a kinder heart. Yet his “Noble Numbers,” or his “Pious Pieces,” though at first they strike one somewhat ludicrously as coming from him, are no mere “making it right” with the powers above—they are the result of the real religious devotion which was at the bottom of Herrick’s, as of every other poet’s heart.

  Herrick is distinctively a poet from whom to receive pleasure. He is not necessarily to be studied; he is to be enjoyed. Doubtless many who love his verses will be led on by an honorable curiosity to desire to know this and that concerning the man and his work. But the poetic enjoyment is the main thing. Herrick is a very individual poet. He has something about him which lifts him out of the crowd of Jacobean and Caroline lyrists, such as Carew and Suckling, nor do we think of him as on precisely the same level as his predecessors the Elizabethans. His poems have a certain air of distinction. Many of them are trivial enough, doubtless, but they are never quite commonplace.

  Herrick is indeed the last expression of the pagan Renaissance, prolonged into the quiddities of the metaphysics, the self-reproaches of the mystics and the devotees, and the darkness of Puritanism. Herrick rises to no spiritual heights nor does he sink into spiritual glooms. He is frankly for this world while it lasts, piously content with its good gifts. His naïveté is partly art, partly nature, or rather it is nature refined by art; for he is out and out an artist—the most perfect specimen of the minor poet that England has ever known. He is purely a lyrist, and in his own vein he is really unsurpassed, whether in the English lyric or any other.

  Our own age has awarded the foremost place among Caroline lyrical poets to Robert Herrick, whose verses, after having been unaccountably neglected throughout the eighteenth century, are now represented in all selections of English poetry…. “Corinna going a-Maying,” perhaps the best known of all Herrick’s country poems, is one of the most perfect studies of idealized village life in the language.

  Indeed within his own sphere, as laureate of pastoral England, and master of the lighter lyric, he has nothing to fear from comparison with the poets of any period of the literature.

  A little over three hundred years ago England had given to her a poet of the very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not discover the fact for more than a hundred and fifty years afterward. The poet himself was aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps not too modestly, in countless quatrains and couplets, which were not read, or, if read, were not much regarded at the moment. It has always been an incredulous world in this matter. So many poets have announced their arrival, and not arrived…. Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of his poems—for he wrote nothing de longue haleine—would place him among the minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. The Herricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as exquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini: the line has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and is never the result of anything but austere labor.