gloom which often will gather over the sunniest nature. Past midnight would come the bellman with his lantern and his light, to warn of the general Session: Rise, ye debtors, then, and fall To make payment, while I call.23 In his sick vigils, when to his trembling fancy : the passing bell doth toll, And the furies in a shoal Come to fright a parting soul,24 he sobs forth his half-despairing, half-protesting Litany. Vainly he endeavours to strip the open grave of its terrors, to cajole Death by gay salutes and caresses, as in the fine mephistophelic invitation to his winding-sheet : Come thou, who art the wine and wit Of all I've writ.25 A more lasting, more genuine, and more comforting, if not altogether satisfying, emotion, as he tosses on his bed, entreating The winds to blow the tedious night away, That I might see the cheerful peeping day,26 is neither of defiance, nor of hopelessness, nor yet of hopefulness, but of unquestioning resignation : Call, and I'll come; say Thou the when and where.27 He has been glad for us; and we owe it to him to share his grief. We need not, however, be too distressfully sorry for his sorrow. The emotional nature of Robin the Poet may probably, as he frolicked with his bevy of 'Queens of Roses', have laid up some cause of uneasiness for the Vicar of Dean Prior. But I discredit the legend of youthful excesses, and think the after-penitence poetically exaggerated. At all events, the offences doubtless were not so flagrant as to falsify his asseveration at the close of the Hesperides: Jocund his verse was, but his life was chaste; or to hinder him from leaving on record as a cardinal article of his Creed, which does not expect God to be indulgent to the bad': I do believe the good, and I, Shall live with Him eternally.2 6 28 To a certain extent the horrors of the night-watches, like the gaieties of daylight, were all in the twenty-four hours' poetic work, and left little bitterness behind. It is difficult, and superfluous to try, to disbelieve the general current of internal testimony in the body of his verse, in age as in youth, to the prevailing serenity of the man. He had a propensity for playing at melancholy as at joviality. Thus, he fears that the morning dew on a clump of primroses implies sorrow, and pauses-nor is ridiculous-to console : Why do ye weep, sweet babes? Can tears Speak grief in you, Who were but born Just as the modest morn Teem'd her refreshing dew ? Alas! you have not known that shower That mars a flower, Nor felt th' unkind Breath of a blasting wind. Nor are ye worn with years, Or warp'd as we, Who think it strange to see Such pretty flowers, like to orphans young, To speak by tears before ye have a tongue.29 With equal ease and charm he could be sad or merry. A touch, and the bright stream dances out. A Prince's birth-the future James the Second's!-has to be welcomed: May his pretty dukeship grow May his soft foot, where it treads, Gardens thence produce and meads; With the rose and violet.30 A humbler babe thanks God for its simple meal; 30 and the charms of Phyllis or Julia could have extracted nothing half so sweet : Here, a little child, I stand, On our meat, and on us all.31 On any and every text the easy flow, the airy glancing hither and thither! Perhaps a little too facile, too even. But how direct and clear-how straight each arrow's flight to its special mark in heart or brain! English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is rich, for instance, in love songs: but very rare, unless in one or two of the great Elizabethans, are Herrick's dainty crispness, delicious naïveté ! What a natural stylist he! The incomparable harmony of diction! How the words, not one too many, seem to have been fated each to its particular spot and time! By an inner force, which disguises itself as merest chance, all flutter down, as irresponsible autumn leaves on a still afternoon into their ordained resting-places on the woodland moss. Such certainty too! The reader never is afraid that the poem, which started with a gallop, will stumble broken-winded before its close. In so rare a phenomenon of dullness, as the Dirge of Dorcas, one suspects that the singer is simply amusing himself with the picture of the sordid regret of the widows for kind, dead neighbour Tabitha's flesh-pots, and charity garments: Ah, Dorcas, Dorcas! now adieu ! Thou being dead, The worsted thread Is cut that made us clothing.32 It is, at any rate, seldom indeed that his wit and humour, any more than his grief and repentance, admit of the least misapprehension. Never did poet's ordinary emotions glide more buoyantly and softly down a smoother current of melodious rhythm, laving sunnier imagery! His fixed place in the poetical hierarchy so far may not be exalted, though very honourable. I dare not say his seat must have been among the princes. I am sure it would have been securely his own. There are magnates whom we could more easily have spared than him, just as he is. He is necessary. Praise thus qualified is, I believe, the rightful due of Herrick, as measured by ninety-nine in a hundred of his poems. The perplexity is in the departures from the standard of level merit which in general contented himself. Poets, the major even more commonly than the minor, are inured to failure. They descend as abruptly as Phaethon, apparently without concern or consciousness. The phenomenon is so ordinary as to be hardly worth notice. In Herrick's case the wonder is to see him, without ceasing to be himself, rise suddenly, as a lark from its nest, into the pure empyrean of inspiration. Fresh from diverting his readers with the discovery of hide or seek' carnations in Lucia's betraying cheek, from gambolling, innocently enough, with maidens who toss a cowslip ball, or from issuing orders to the entire human race to await the leave of my Julia' before venturing to 'dispose itself to live or die', he soars into three noble lyrics. It is a mystery of mind, of inspiration, how the adorer of Perenna, Perilla, Silvia, Corinna, Electra, Lucia, Julia, and the rest, could have conceived the offer of knightly service to Anthea. How bravely it rings! Bid me to live, and I will live Thy Protestant to be, Or bid me love, and I will give A heart as soft, a heart as kind, As in the whole world thou canst find, Bid that heart stay, and it will stay To honour thy decree; Or bid it languish quite away, And 't shall do so for thee. Bid me to weep, and I will weep Thou art my life, my love, my heart, And hast command of every part To live and die for thee.33 Then, wonder on wonder, we come upon Blossoms and Daffodils! The song to Anthea was of a refreshing vigour, downright and stirring. It gives a sense of open air, breezy sunshine, as we emerge from the half-lights and millinery of love ditties and Valentines. I do not pretend for it that we feel, as with great poetry, that it has descended upon us, we know not whence. The other two belong to another |