Herrick.
Robert Herrick, son of a prosperous goldsmith of a Leicestershire family, was born in London, in 1591, and for twelve years was an "Elizabethan," though his poems are "Caroline". In 1607 Herrick was apprenticed to his uncle; in 1613 entered as a Fellow Commoner at St. John's, Cambridge, he migrated to Trinity Hall, and took his Master's degree in 1620. He had friends and patrons at Court, was one of the sons of Ben Jonson, and lived on his wits and on his patrons, in a poetical, musical, pleasant idleness. He took holy orders, not in the spirit of George Herbert, and in 1629 received the living of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. He did not desert, and probably did not neglect, his parish, from which he was thrust by the Puritans in 1647; in the next year his "Noble Numbers," and "Hesperides" was printed in "a rich disorder"—the lines are on various levels in this most desirable volume. The frontispiece shows a fleshly, muscular rather Roman-looking poet to whose lips the bees bring honey. At the Restoration, Herrick was restored to Dean Prior, where he died in October, 1674.
"Dull Devonshire" he calls the county, in his verses; he did not live long to resent its rural torpor. His delightful poems are all full of the country life, they smell April and May. His book is like a large laughing meadow in early June, all diapered with flowers, and sweet with the songs of birds, some a mere note or two of merry music, some as prolonged and varied, though never so passionate, as the complaint of the nightingale.
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers;
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
Everything is sweet, spontaneous, glad and musical. Some pieces are far from straitlaced of course, but, even setting these apart, "The Hesperides" hold the greatest and richest bouquet of English songs. Favourites are "Delight in Disorder," "Gather Ye Rose buds while Ye May," "Corinna's Going a Maying,"
To Anthea (Bid me to live and I will live
Thy Protestant to be.)
To Meadows (Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers.)
To Daffodils (Fair daffodils, we weep to see.)
To Blossoms (Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?)
and so on; every reader culls and chooses for himself, and cannot go wrong. Herrick speaks in his "Noble Numbers" of
my unbaptized rhymes
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,