Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/405

] very soul of nature's melody and rapture. He revels in all the charms of the country—flowers, buds, fairies, bees, the gorgeous blossoming May, the pathos and antique simplicity of rural life; its marriages, its churchyard histories, its imagery of awaking and fading existence. The free, joyous, quaint, and musical flow and rhythm of his verse, has all that felicity and that ring of woodland cadences which mark the snatches of rustic verse that Shakespeare scatters through his dramas. His "Night Piece to Juliet," beginning,—

is precisely of that character. His "Daffodils" express the beautiful but melancholy sentiment which he so frequently found in nature—



Herrick's works are his "Hesperides" and his "Noble Numbers," the latter being religious, and not equal to the former. In religious tone, intensity, and grandeur, Herbert is infinitely his superior. Herbert was in early life a courtier; his eldest brother was the celebrated sceptical writer, lord Herbert of Cherbury. Herbert's hopes of court preferment fortunately ceasing with the death of king James, he took orders, grew extremely religious, married an admirably suited wife, and retired to Bemerton parsonage, about a mile from Salisbury, where he died of consumption at the age of thirty-six. Herbert was the very personification of Chaucer's "Good Parson." His life was one constant scene of piety and benevolence. Beloved by his parishioners, happy in his congenial wife, and passionately fond of music and his poetry, his days glided away as