Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on his first going up to London, failed to lay any appreciable spell upon him. That great name, moreover, is a jewel which finds no setting in Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence rela-tive to brother poets is extremely curious when we reflect on his penchant for addressing four-line epics to this or that individual. They were, in the main, obscure individuals, whose iden-tity is scarcely worth establishing. His London life, at two different periods, brought him into contact with many of the celebrities of the day;but his verse has helped to confer immortality on very few of them. That his verse had the secret of conferring immortality was one of his unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a finer confidence when he wrote, Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own poetry, and he is not by any means backward in speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils.
Without his Muse those nineteen years in that dull, secluded Devonshire village would have been unendurable.
His poetry has the value and the defect of that seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted horizon there is great variety in Herrick's themes.
Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has stated it:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers;I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes;I write of Youth, of Love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris;I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write How roses first came red and lilies white;I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King;I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Never was there so pretty a table of contents!
When you open his book the breath of the Eng-lish rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense of hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honey-suckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, re-turning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one's ear, as sounds should fall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly English as Herrick. He painted the country life of his own time as no other has painted it at any time.
It is to be remarked that the majority of Eng-lish poets regarded as national have sought their chief inspiration in almost every land and period excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but the Garden of Eden and the celestial spaces, that lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion that have given Keats his spacious niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy.
