ild, not mad.
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."

Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a
cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and
elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody,
sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits
of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an
occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish
festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the
daffodil. He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to
"Julia," and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been
called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of
_Carpe diem_, and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of
his best-known poems, such as {148} _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_,
and _To Corinna, To Go a Maying_.

Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his
pleasant volume of Essays, published after the Restoration; but he was
thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of
love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the
metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much
dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into
English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the
_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and followed
the exiled court to France. Side by side with the Church poets were
the cavaliers--Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and
others--gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled
love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost
every thing in the king's service and was several times imprisoned,
wrote two famous songs--_To Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which
occur the lines,

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."

and _To Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy,
majesty, and glories of his king," and declares that "stone walls do
not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was
sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford,
raised a troop of horse {149} for Charles I., was impeached by the
Parliament and fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who
penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from obli