Search worlds of ice and rather there
Live than in loathèd Devonshire.
“No bird,” says Plato, “sings when it is cold or hungry or suffering any pain,” and it is a natural inference from passages like this of Herrick’s that his native genius suffered rather than gained from his sojourn at Dean Prior. But on this point he has left us his own testimony in two important passages. The first runs thus:—
Before I went
In banishment
Into the loathèd West,
I could rehearse
A lyric verse,
And speak it with the best.
The second is—