George Herbert.
This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue:
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
“Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.”
And now, that I have quoted this, I wish that I had quoted another; and so it would be, I suppose, were I to go through the little book. One cannot go amiss of lines that will show his tenderness, his strong religious feeling, his gloomy coloring, his quaint conceits—with not overmuch rhythmic grace, but a certain spiritual unction that commends him to hosts of devout-minded people everywhere. Yet I cannot help thinking that he would have been lost sight of earlier in the swarm of seventeenth-century poets, had it not been for a certain romantic glow attaching to his short life. And first, he was a scion from the old Pembroke stock, born in a great castle on the Welsh borders, and bred in luxury. He went to Cambridge for study at a time when he may have encountered there the grim boy-student, Oliver Cromwell, or possibly that other fair-faced Cambridge student, John Milton, who was upon the rolls eight years later. He was a young fellow of rare scholarship, winning many honors; was tall, spare, with an eagle eye; and so he wins upon old James I., when he comes down on a visit to the University (the Mother Herbert managing to have the King see his best points, even to his silken doublets and his jewelled buckles, of which the lad was fond). And he is taken into favor, bandies compliments with the monarch, goes again and again to London and to court; sees Chancellor Bacon familiarly—corrects proofs for him—and has hopes of high preferment. But his chief patron dies; the King dies; and that bubble of royal inflation is at an end.
It was after long mental struggle, it would seem, that George Herbert, whom we know as the saintly poet, let the hopes of court consequence die out of his heart. But once wedded to the Church his religious activities and sanctities knew no hesitations. His marriage even was an incident that had no worldly or amorous delays. A Mr. Danvers, kinsman of Herbert’s step-father, thought all the world of the poet, and declared his utter willingness that Herbert “should marry any one of his nine daughters [for he had so many], but rather Jane, because Jane was his beloved daughter.” And to such good effect did the father talk to Jane, that she, as old Walton significantly tells us, was in love with the poet before yet she had seen him. Only four days after their first meeting these twain were married; nor did this sudden union bring such disastrous result as so swift an engineering of similar contracts is apt to show.
At Bemerton vicarage, almost under the shadow of Salisbury cathedral, he began, shortly thereafter, that saintly and poetic life which his verse illustrates and which every memory of him ennobles. His charities were beautiful and constant; his love of the flesh, his early “choler,” and all courtly leanings crucified. Even the peasants thereabout stayed the plough and listened reverently (another Angelus!) when the sounds of his “Praise-bells” broke upon the air. It is a delightful picture the old Angler biographer gives of him there in his quiet vicarage of Bemerton, or footing it away over Salisbury Plain, to lift up his orison in symphony with the organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of Salisbury’s wondrous cathedral.
Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his life, a tender gloom lay constantly; the grave and death were always in his eye—always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him sorely, he died.
He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor. It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a mile and a half away; and at Wilton—the carpet town—which is only a fifteen minutes’ walk beyond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his poetic kinsman; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse builded into The Temple of George Herbert.