The interval was come when Shakespeare him-self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural," says Mr. Pal-grave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical;he had not the learned polish, the political al-lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were then and onward demanded from poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap-proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec-tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?
The "Hesperides" was received with chilling indifference. None of Herrick's great contem-poraries has left a consecrating word concerning it. The book was not reprinted during the au-thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1796
the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake published in his "Literary Hours" three critical papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ-ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives of the Poets," though space was found for half a score of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810 Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him.
In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful that some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand-ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant; the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun make no reference to him; <1> and in the wide parenthesis formed by his birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discover-able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-two years. Here is material for profundity and ciphers!
Herrick's second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648 and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting for the <1> With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the <i>Musarum Deliciae</i> (1656) who mentions That old sack Young Herrick took to entertain The Muses in a sprightly vein.
instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in further literary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution to the "Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649.
He seems to have had lodgings, for a while at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the merry London of his early manhood. Time and war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting.
Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and many another comrade "in disgrace with for-tune and men's eyes." As Herrick walked through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy river-bank in those years, his thought must have turned more than once to the little vicarage in Devonshire, and lingered tenderly.
On the accession of Charles II. a favorable change of wind wafted Herrick back to his former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred on August 24, 1662, the seventy-first anniver-sary of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's move-ments after that, tradition does not furnish even the shadow of an outline. The only notable event concerning him is recorded twelve years later in the parish register: "Robert Herrick, vicker, was buried ye 15" day October, 1674."
He was eighty-three years old. The location of his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to his memory was erected in Dean Church. And this is all.
II
THE details that have come down to us touch-ing Herrick's private life are as meagre as if he had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But were they as ample as could be desired they would still be unimportant compared with the single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his "Hesperides." The environments of the man were accidental and transitory. The significant part of him we have, and that is enduring so long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold a charm for mankind.
A fine thing incomparably said instantly be-comes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of dateless excellence. Though it may have been said three hundred years ago, it is as modern as yesterday; though it may have been said yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have been always in our keeping. This quality of remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in their freshness, must surely have been aware here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic poets dead and gone.
Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message to the world, and such message as he had he was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this point he somewhere says:
Let others to the printing presse run fast;Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste.
He had need of his patience, for he was long detained on the road by many of those obstacles that waylay poets on their journeys to the printer.
