hing is out of proportion
or out of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious people in
their winsome way, "part pagan, part papistical;" they have their
pardons and indulgences, their psalters and chapels, and

An apple's-core is hung up dried,
With rattling kernels, which is rung
To call to Morn and Even-song;

and very conveniently,

Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut,
The Holy-water there is put.

It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the
impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648
seems never very far away.

It is only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the
Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and
liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes,
there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen
from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline." This delicate epicede would
have fitted Imogen:

Here a solemne fast we keepe
While all beauty lyes asleepe;
Husht be all things; no noyse here
But the toning of a teare,
Or a sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering.

Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in essence; the Mad Maid's Song,
for example. The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist. A
poet's lyrics may be, as most of Browning's are, just so many
_dramatis personae_. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in a
seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized
in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his
couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances are
intended presentations of himself:

To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.

In point of fact he was a whole group of imaginary lovers in one.
Silvia, Anthea, Electra, Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively
ladies ending in _a_, were doubtless, for the most part, but airy
phantoms dancing--as they should not have danced--through the brain of
a sentimental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar of the Church
of England. Even with his overplus of heart it would have been quite
impossible for him to have had enough to go round had there been so
numerous actual demands upon it.

Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's verse: at its best it has wings
that carry it nearly as close to heaven