The mellow touch of musick most doth wound
The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise,
But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
. . . Then let me lye
Entranc'd, and lost confusedly;
And by thy musick stricken mute,
Die, and be turn'd into a lute.
Herrick never married. His modest Devonshire establishment was managed by a maidservant named Prudence Baldwin. “Fate likes fine names,” says Lowell. That of Herrick's maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber of what may be called a joyous little threnody:
In this little urne is laid
Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid;
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.
Herrick addressed a number of poems to her before her death, which seems to have deeply touched him in his loneliness. We shall not allow a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flippancy of an old writer who says that “Prue was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse.” She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note of sincerity not usual with him:
These summer birds did with thy master stay
The times of warmth, but then they flew away,
Leaving their poet, being now grown old,
Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold.
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide
As well the winter's as the summer's tide:
For which thy love, live with thy master here
Not two, but all the seasons of the year.
Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mistress Prew!
In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Deanbourn, which he calls “a rude river,” and his characterization of Devon folk as “a people currish, churlish as the seas,” the fullest and pleasantest days of his life were probably spent at Dean Prior. He was not unmindful meanwhile of the gathering political storm that was to shake England to its foundations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he watched the course of events, is attested by many of his poems. This solitude was not without its compensation. “I confess,” he says,
I ne'er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the presse
Than where I loath'd so much.