Herrick amongst the
poets of religion, for the very act records that the jolly, careless
Anacreon of the church, with his head and heart crowded with pleasures,
threw down at length his wine-cup, tore the roses from his head, and
knelt in the dust.

Nothing bears Herrick's name so unrefined as the things Dr. Donne wrote
in his youth; but the impression made by his earlier poems is of a man of
far shallower nature, and greatly more absorbed in the delights of the
passing hour. In the year 1648, when he was fifty-seven years of age,
being prominent as a Royalist, he was ejected from his living by the
dominant Puritans; and in that same year he published his poems, of which
the latter part and later written is his _Noble Numbers_, or religious
poems. We may wonder at his publishing the _Hesperides_ along with them,
but we must not forget that, while the manners of a time are never to be
taken as a justification of what is wrong, the judgment of men concerning
what is wrong will be greatly influenced by those manners--not
necessarily on the side of laxity. It is but fair to receive his own
testimony concerning himself, offered in these two lines printed at the
close of his _Hesperides_:

To his book's end this last line he'd have placed:
_Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste_.

We find the same artist in the _Noble Numbers_ as in the _Hesperides_,
but hardly the same man. However far he may have been from the model of a
clergyman in the earlier period of his history, partly no doubt from the
society to which his power of song made him acceptable, I cannot believe
that these later poems are the results of mood, still less the results of
mere professional bias, or even sense of professional duty.

In a good many of his poems he touches the heart of truth; in others,
even those of epigrammatic form, he must be allowed to fail in point as
well as in meaning. As to his art-forms, he is guilty of great offences,
the result of the same passion for lawless figures and similitudes which
Dr. Donne so freely indulged. But his verses are brightened by a certain
almost childishly quaint and innocent humour; while the tenderness of
some of them rises on the reader like the aurora of the coming sun of
George Herbert. I do not forget that, even if some of his poems were
printed in 1639, years before that George Herbert had done his work and
gone home: my figure stands in relation to the order I have adopted.

Some of his