the world, and such
message as he had he was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this
point he somewhere says:

Let others to the printing presse run fast;
Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste.

He had need of his patience, for he was long detained on the road by
many of those obstacles that waylay poets on their journeys to the
printer.

Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he published the "Hesperides."
It was, I repeat, no heavy message, and the bearer was left an
unconscionable time to cool his heels in the antechamber. Though his
pieces had been set to music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, and
Laniers, and his court poems had naturally won favor with the Cavalier
party, Herrick cut but a small figure at the side of several of his
rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. It sometimes happens
that the light love-song, reaching few or no ears at its first singing,
outlasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, dealing with some
passing phase of thought, social or political, gains the instant
applause of the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is somehow
apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the
yesterday's editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to get
hold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate.

Mr. Henry James once characterized Alphonse Daudet as "a great little
novelist." Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of his
poems, for he wrote nothing _de longue haleine_, would place him among
the minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. The
Herricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The
accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was one
of the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as
exquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini; the
line has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu,
and is never the result of anything but austere labor. The critic who,
borrowing Milton's words, described these carefully wrought poems as
"wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of penetration. They are full
of subtle simplicity. Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as an
antique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in which the poet speaks of his
lady-love's "winter face"--and there a couplet that breaks into unfading
daffodils and violets. The art, though invisible, is always there. His
amato