Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one place Herrick <1> The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi-cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living "in habits of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her-rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for Jonson had been dead eleven years.
laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what would have been Pepys's man-ner had Pepys written verse), and in another place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's <i>concetti</i>:
One of the five straight branches of my hand Is lopt already, and the rest but stand Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.
With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understood and loved music. None but a lover could have said:
The mellow touch of musick most doth wound The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice, As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise, But listen to thee walking in thy chamber Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
. . . Then let me lye Entranc'd, and lost confusedly;And by thy musick stricken mute, Die, and be turn'd into a lute.
Herrick never married. His modest Devon-shire establishment was managed by a maid-servant named Prudence Baldwin. "Fate likes fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick's maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber of what may be called a joyous little threnody:
In this little urne is laid Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid;From whose happy spark here let Spring the purple violet.
Herrick addressed a number of poems to her before her death, which seems to have deeply touched him in his loneliness. We shall not al-low a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flip-pancy of an old writer who says that "Prue was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse."
She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note of sincerity not usual with him:
These summer birds did with thy master stay The times of warmth, but then they flew away, Leaving their poet, being now grown old, Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold.
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide As well the winter's as the summer's tide:
For which thy love, live with thy master here Not two, but all the seasons of the year.
Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mis-tress Prew!
In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Dean-bourn, which he calls "a rude river," and his characterization of Devon folk as "a peo-ple currish, churlish as the seas," the fullest and pleasantest days of his life were prob-ably spent at Dean Prior. He was not un-mindful meanwhile of the gathering political storm that was to shake England to its foun-dations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he watched the course of events, is attested by many of his poems. This solitude was not without its compensation. "I confess," he says, I ne'er invented such Ennobled numbers for the presse Than where I loath'd so much.
A man is never wholly unhappy when he is writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced that each new lyric was a stone added to the pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of relief was tinged with indefinable regret when he found himself suddenly deprived of his bene-fice. The integrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was not given the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman with pronounced Cromwellian views.
Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habili-ments, and hastened to London to pick up such as were left of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once more he would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe the air breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and gin-ger shall be hot I' the mouth too." In the gladness of getting back "from the dull con-fines of the drooping west," he writes a glow-ing apostrophe to London--that "stony step-mother to poets." He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royal-istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but among them was not poverty.
The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few weeks following his return to London they were issued in a sin-gle volume with the title "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq."
The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the commonplace.
