Hastening to London, he threw off his sober priest's robe, and once more putting on the gay dress worn by the gentlemen of his day he forgot the troubles and the duties of a country parson.
Rejoicing in his freedom he cried:—
"London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment;
Yet since called back; henceforward let me be,
O native country, repossess'd by thee."
He had no money, but he had many wealthy friends, so he lived, we may believe, merrily enough for the next fifteen years. It was during these years that the Hesperides was first published, although for a long time before many people had known his poems, for they had been handed about among his friends in manuscript.
So the years passed for Herrick we hardly know how. In the great world Cromwell died and Charles II returned to England to claim the throne of his fathers. Then it would seem that Herrick had not found all the joy he had hoped for in London, for two years later, although rocks had not turned to rivers, nor rivers to men, he went back to his "loathed Devonshire."
After that, all that we know of him is that at Dean Prior "Robert Herrick vicker was buried ye 15th day of October 1674." Thus in twilight ends the life of the greatest lyric poet of the seventeenth century.
All the lyric poets of whom I have told you were Royalists, but
the Puritans too had their poets, and before ending this chapter
I would like to tell you a little of Andrew Marvell, a
Parliamentary poet.
If Herrick was a lover of flowers, Marvell was a lover of gardens, woods and meadows. The garden poet he has been called. He felt himself in touch with Nature:—
"Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer,
And little now to make me wants,
Or of the fowls or of the plants:
Give me but wings as they, and I
Straight floating in the air shall fly;
Or turn me but, and you shall see
I was but an inverted tree."*