st poetry of the period,
from Donne to Milton, and in the prose of Baxter and Bunyan; the Cavalier
in a small group of poets,--Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, and Carew,--who
write songs generally in lighter vein, gay, trivial, often licentious, but
who cannot altogether escape the tremendous seriousness of Puritanism.

THOMAS CAREW (1598?-1639?). Carew may be called the inventor of Cavalier
love poetry, and to him, more than to any other, is due the peculiar
combination of the sensual and the religious which marked most of the minor
poets of the seventeenth century. His poetry is the Spenserian pastoral
stripped of its refinement of feeling and made direct, coarse, vigorous.
His poems, published in 1640, are generally, like his life, trivial or
sensual; but here and there is found one, like the following, which
indicates that with the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets a new and
stimulating force had entered English literature:

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose,
For in your beauty's orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Ask me no more where those stars light
That downwards fall in dead of night,
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become as in their sphere.
Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest,
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.

ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674). Herrick is the true Cavalier, gay, devil-may-
care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior,
in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a
country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and
the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old
housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame lamb, one hen,--for which he
thanked God in poetry because she laid an egg every day,--and a pet pig
that drank beer with Herrick out of a tankard. With admirable good nature,
Herrick made the best of these uncongenial surroundings. He watched with
sympathy the country life about him and caught its spirit in many lyrics, a
few of which, like "Corinna's Maying," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,"
and "To Daffodils," are among the best known in our language. His poems
cover a wide range, from trivial love songs, pagan in spirit, to hymns of
deep religious feeling. Only the best of his poems should be read; and
these are remarkable for