hour
(whatever hour it may be) "when stars are weeping," have left behind
them such stuff as may be sung, but certainly cannot be read and endured
by any one with an ear for verse. The author of the Ode on France and
the author of the Ode to the West Wind have left us hardly more than a
song a-piece which has been found fit for setting to music: and, lovely
as they are, the fame of their authors does not mainly depend on the
song of Glycine or the song of which Leigh Hunt so justly and so
critically said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the
kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his
songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and
prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or
epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but
nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer--as surely as
Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist--ever born of English race. The
apparent or external variety of his versification is, I should suppose,
incomparable; but by some happy tact or instinct he was too naturally
unambitious to attempt, like Jonson, a flight in the wake of Pindar. He
knew what he could not do: a rare and invaluable gift. Born a blackbird
or a thrush, he did not take himself (or try) to be a nightingale.

It has often been objected that he did mistake himself for a sacred
poet: and it cannot be denied that his sacred verse at its worst is as
offensive as his secular verse at its worst; nor can it be denied that
no severer sentence of condemnation can be passed upon any poet's work.
But neither Herbert nor Crashaw could have bettered such a divinely
beautiful triplet as this:--

"We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who with His sunshine and His showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers".

That is worthy of Miss Rossetti herself: and praise of such work can go
no higher.

But even such exquisite touches or tones of colour may be too often
repeated in fainter shades or more glaring notes of assiduous and facile
reiteration. The sturdy student who tackles his Herrick as a schoolboy
is expected to tackle his Horace, in a spirit of pertinacious and stolid
straightforwardness, will probably find himself before long so nauseated
by the incessant inhalation of spices and flowers, condiments and
kisses, that if a musk-rat had run over the page it could hardly be less
endurable to the physical than it is to