This pair of ‘noble numbers,’ of brilliant and fervent lyrics, is from Hesperides, or, The Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrich, Esq. (1648).
[IX]
No. 61, ‘Vertue,’ in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, 1632–33. Compare Herbert to Christopher Farrer, as reported by Izaak Walton:—‘Tell him that I do not repine, but am pleased with my want of health; and tell him, my heart is fixed on that place where true joy is only to be found, and that I long to be there, and do wait for my appointed change with hope and patience.’
[X]
From The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, printed 1659. Compare VI. (Beaumont, ante, p. [15]), and Bacon, Essays, ‘On Death’: ‘But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis, when a man hath attained worthy ends and expectations.’
[XI]
Written in the November of 1637, and printed next year in the Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King. ‘In this Monody,’ the title runs, ‘the Author bewails a Learned Friend unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie, then in their height.’ King, who died at five- or six-and-twenty, was a personal friend of Milton's, but the true accents of grief are inaudible in Lycidas, which is, indeed, an example as perfect as exists of Milton's capacity for turning whatever he touched into pure poetry: an arrangement, that is, of ‘the best words in the best order’; or, to go still further than Coleridge, the best words in the prescribed or inevitable sequence that makes the arrangement art. For the innumerable allusions see Professor Masson's edition of Milton (Macmillan, 1890), i. 187–201, and iii. 254–276.
[XII]
The Eighth Sonnet (Masson): ‘When the Assault was Intended to the City.’ Written in 1642, with Rupert and the King at Brentford, and printed in the edition of 1645.