d I sing
The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King;
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

Never was there so pretty a table of contents! When you open his book
the breath of the English rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem to
exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavender
had been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense of
hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices half
hidden with honeysuckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, returning
home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one's ear, as sounds should
fall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly English
as Herrick. He painted the country life of his own time as no other has
painted it at any time.

It is to be remarked that the majority of English poets regarded as
national have sought their chief inspiration in almost every land and
period excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, Denmark, Greece,
Egypt, and to many a hitherto unfooted region of the imagination, for
plot and character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but the Garden of Eden
and the celestial spaces, that lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian
Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion that
have given Keats his spacious niche in the gallery of England's poets.
Shelley's two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belong
respectively to Greece and Italy. Browning's The Ring and the Book is
Italian; Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the Idylls of the
King, and Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in
dignity to none produced in the nineteenth century--is a Persian story.
But Herrick's "golden apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, and
reddened in the mist and sunshine of his native island.

Even the fairy poems, which must be classed by themselves, are not
wanting in local flavor. Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable
distance from that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Puck and Titania
are of finer breath than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to have
Devonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Like
the magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color and
perfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts--from the
cups of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything is
marvelously adapted to their requirement; not