grateful for eternally.
Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy.
There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill their
laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever
maying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they
sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and
set them for ever where they are.

His Moral.

And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as those
younglings of the year she bears with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawny
continent.' Herrick is pre-eminently the poet of flowers. He alone were
capable of bringing back

'Le bouquet d'Ophelie
De la rive inconnue ou les flots l'ont laisse.

He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tender
and shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondest
metaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves,
and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able so
well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the
maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from
those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless
violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually
'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent
perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just
as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of
maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little
moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins
that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the
'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that he
dreads to lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regret
with which he sees things hastening to their end.

His Piety.

That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard
Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper.
To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain.
In his _Noble Numbers_ Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such
men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his
that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their
reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple
gal