organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of Salisbury's wondrous cathedral. Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his life, a tender gloom lay constantly; the grave and death were always in his eye-always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him sorely, he died. He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor. It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a mile and a half away; and at Wilton-the carpet town - which is only a fifteen minutes' walk beyond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his poetic kinsman; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse builded into The Temple of George Herbert. Robert Herrick. I deal with a clergyman again; but there are clergymen and clergymen. Robert Herrick * was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London-learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, per Robert Herrick b. (or at least baptized) 1591; d. 1674. The fullest edition of his works is that edited by Dr. Grosart, and published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1876. haps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar's sermons were we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer "noble numbers" which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar's garden of Devon. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names. Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow: "The soft, sweet moss shall be thy bed, The tongues of kids shall be thy meat; The paste of filberts for thy bread, Thy feasting table shall be hills With daisies spread and daffodils; Where thou shalt sit, and Red-breast by, Then again, see how in his soberer and meditative moods, he can turn the rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet sound: "In the hour of my distress, Sweet Spirit, comfort me! "When I lie within my bed, Sweet Spirit, comfort me! "When the house doth sigh and weep, "When the passing bell doth toll, "When the judgment is reveal'd, And that opened which was seal'd; Sweet Spirit, comfort me!" Now, in reading these two poems of such opposite tone, and yet of agreeing verbal harmonies, one would say here is a singer, serene, devout, of delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal for earth. Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far |