Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/198

178 in the superstitions, rites, and customs which still lingered in English country-life. He was the poet of all pretty things, and it is their prettiness which he accentuates and heightens,—flowers, fairies, young girls, rites pagan and Christian, good wine, and good verses. He enumerates them in the opening lines of Hesperides (1647), in which he gathered together most of his secular epigrams, songs, and other verses. The spirit of the "pious pieces" which compose Noble Numbers is not very different. Herrick does not approach God with the earnest pleading of Herbert, the rapt love of Crashaw, or the mystic awe of Vaughan, but with the artless frankness of a child confessing his naughtiness and asking to escape too severe a penalty.

The technical perfection of Herrick's work within its limited range places him as an artist second to Milton only. Of English poets none seem to inherit so closely, though in very different ways, from the French poets who composed the Pleiad, Milton fulfilling as none of them had been able to do the bolder programme of epic and tragedy and ode, Herrick catching all the pagan grace and fancy of their lighter Anacreontic strains to which he gave certainly no less of classical perfection of style. Had such ease and finish been attained by writers of eulogistic, satiric, and reflective verse in decasyllabic couplets, there would have been little for Dryden and Pope to do in the way of "correcting " English poetry.

A poet whose early and best work, written under the Commonwealth, has the motives and temper of