ry songs and catches are such poetry as Orlando would have liked to
hang on the boughs in the forest of Arden. None of the work is hastily
done, not even that portion of it we could wish had not been done at
all. Be the motive grave or gay, it is given that faultlessness of form
which distinguishes everything in literature that has survived its
own period. There is no such thing as "form" alone; it is only the
close-grained material that takes the highest finish. The structure
of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is simple to the verge of
innocence. Such rhythmic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson, and
Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his manner has this perfection: it
fits his matter as the cup of the acorn fits its meat.

Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here are
no "tears from the depth of some divine despair," no probings into the
tragic heart of man, no insight that goes much farther than the pathos
of a cowslip on a maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach up to
the light, and love the warmer side of the garden wall. But the reader
who does not detect the seriousness under the lightness misreads
Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been wholesome and joyous singers.
A pessimistic poet, like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sarcasms.
In his own bright pastoral way Herrick must always remain unexcelled.
His limitations are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the
sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his utterance is there any
complexity; both are as pellucid as a woodland pond, content to
duplicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, the face of a girl
straying near its crystal. His is no troubled stream in which large
trout are caught. He must be accepted on his own terms.

The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, been the most indebted
to their predecessors or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been
remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly original. Impressionability
is one of the conditions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind is
the only mind that invents. What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goes
into his blood, and becomes an ingredient of his originality. The
color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its
affinities. A writer's style, if it have distinction, is the outcome of
a hundred styles.

Though a generous borrower of the ancients, Herrick appears to have been
exceptionally free from the influence