“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.