h him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':

My once-dear Love!--hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--

take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:

When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!

How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--

--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most