_Hesperides_, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic
illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A. Abbey.
Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the
Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The
most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a True Lent._ But it
may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry
certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon
companion at

...those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad.
And yet each verse of thine,
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.

Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a
cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and
elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody,
sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits of
the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an
occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish festivals
and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil. He
sang the praises of the country life, love songs to "Julia," and hymns
of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been called the English
Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of _Carpe diem_ and
regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known
poems, such as _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_, and _To Corinna, To
Go a Maying._

Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his
fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to
subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and
died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin's Chapel at Loretto. He is best
known to the general reader by his _Wishes for his Unknown Mistress_,

That not impossible she

which is included in most of the anthologies. His religious poetry
expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St.
Theresa, "undaunted daughter of desires," who is the subject of a
splendid apostrophe in his poem, _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is, in
fact, a poet of passages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly
uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits. In one of his Latin
epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana:

Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum:

as engl