volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy
Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy
Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps,
in Keble's _Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the
Anglican Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression
in poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_--

"Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," etc.

are known to most readers, as well as the line,

"Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that
and the action fine."

The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual {146} feeling. But Herbert's
poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from
_Whitsunday_,

"Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,"

which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, written by his
contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul

. . . "grew so fast within
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin."

Another of these Church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or
Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Francis Quarles'
_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers,
both in Old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a
figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in
verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The
most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.

One of the most delightful of English lyric poets is Robert Herrick,
whose _Hesperides_, 1648 has lately received such sympathetic
illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E. A. Abbey.
Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church, {147} and was expelled
by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in
Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a
True Lent_. But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly
clerical; his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben
Jonson and his boon companion at

. . . "those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly w