manence any other parent.

With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said

Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.

Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he