Turns all the patient earth to flowers.
I think if we compare these two poems, which embody Herrick’s attitude to nature and country life during the Dean Prior period, with some of the earlier (as I think) lyrics in the Hesperides, we shall feel that if Dean Prior took something from him, it also gave him something. Compare them, for instance, with “Fair Daffodils, we weep to see,” or the song to “Meddows,” which begins “Ye have been fresh and green.” These last are beautiful fancies, among the most beautiful in our language, but they have not the depth or fulness of feeling which the triplet has. That breathes the spirit of the true lover of rural life, and so it seems to me that if Herrick, in this little out-of-the-way village, felt the lyric power gone, if the “fairy fancies” no longer “ranged” or “lightly stirred” as before, on the other hand, something of the peace of a country village, something of the peace which Wordsworth felt two centuries later, had descended upon him.
Finally, let me call the reader’s attention to the two “Graces for little children,” also to be found in Noble Numbers:—
Here a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee
For a Benison to fall
On our meat and on us all.
And again—