Page:Books and men.djvu/133

 Rh possessor, and, being within the reach of all, grows daily in our favor. French poets, like Gautier and Sully Prudhomme, have been content to strike all their lives upon a single resonant note, and men of far inferior genius have produced less perfect work in the same willfully restricted vein. The pressure of the outside world sorely chafes these unresponsive natures; large issues paralyze their pens. They turn by instinct from the coarseness, the ugliness, the realness of life, and sing of it with graceful sadness and with delicate laughter, as if the whole thing were a pathetic or a fantastic dream. They are dumb before its riddles and silent in its uproar, standing apart from the tumult, and letting the impetuous crowd—"mostly fools," as Carlyle said—sweep by them unperceived. Herrick is their prototype, the poet who polished off his little glittering verses about Julia's silks and Dianeme's ear-rings when all England was dark with civil war. But even this armed neutrality, this genuine and admirable indifference, cannot always save us from the rough knocks of a burly and aggressive world. The revolution, which he ignored, drove Herrick from