MR. PALGRAVE'S SELECTIONS FROM IIERRICK.* IT seems strange that the

delightful task accomplished so admirably by Mr. Palgrave has not been undertaken before. Herrick's grossness has kept his otherwise lovely poetry out of the hands of women, and every reader of refined feeling has been alternately attracted by the poet's lyrical sweetness and repelled by his in- tolerable coarseness. And this prurience of fancy is the less excusable in Herrick, who was a clergyman of many years' standing, and verging upon sixty years of age when he published his love- poems. It could not have been owing to this fault that Herrick was entirely neglected by the dull-minded anthologists of the last century. Like Sidney, Herbert, and Vaughan, the poet of the Hesperides was despised because he was not understood ; and Herrick's fine genius, which, as Mr. Palgrave justly remarks, is unique of its kind, had not received critical recognition until the .last half -century.

"I make no haste to have my numbers read,

Seldom comes glory till a man be dead,"

shows that the poet did not gain full praise from his contem- poraries, but conscious as he was of the genius that inspired him, be is not likely to have foreseen how long he was destined to wait for his fame. We venture to think that Chrysornela will do much to accelerate its growth, and the publication is all the more welcome at a time when simplicity and straightforwardness—two eminent vir- tues of Herrick's poetry—are far less valued than they should be,— are, indeed, often contemptuously regarded by the young poets of the age. Herrick bad some faults as an artist, but he never loses himself in conceits nor fails in perspicacity. Like Burns, he goes direct to his subject ; he always knows what he wishes to say, and always says it in the purest English. This explains the frequently modern style of his verse. We forget that we are separated from him by more than two hundred years—the same period, by the way, which divides us from the quaint Herbert and the quainter Quarles—when we read such verses as,— " Gather ye rose-buds while ye may," or the familiar lines to Anthea. The epigrammatic brevity of so many of Herrick's poems is a noticeable feature. In the longest pieces there is never a waste of words, nothing of the Superfluity which so often mars the beauty of Wordsworth's loveliest work, and the shorter poems are marvels of point and condensation. Iligh imagination is not one of Herrick's attributes. Ho has written what he calls "Noble Numbers," but his verse is not noble. He cannot, like Milton, see or tell of things invisible, but he writes charmingly of Julia's petticoat, and discovers poetry in her shoe- tie and in the "liquefaction of her clothes." There are few traces of tenderness of feeling in Herrick, none, we think, of strong passion, but it is probable that every pretty girl be saw suggested a pretty fancy. To judge from his own saying, "No man at one time can be wise and love," Herrick was not wise. If we may trust his poetry, the poet was perennially in love, chiefly with Julia, "prime of all ;" but warmly, too, and more so than was sometimes fitting, with Anthea, Lucia, Corinna, and Ferilla. There is safety in numbers, and Herrick's Devonshire girls, who, as all the world knows, are the prettiest in England, may not, after all, have made much havoc with his heart. He is never jealous, never impassioned, and gives no token of being willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the beloved one. Making love is, in Herrick's eyes, a charming amusement, and the more love-making, the more poetry. If Julia prove unkind he can solace himself with Sappho, and if Sappho be perverse, some other mistress will charm him with her "pretty witchcrafts." His comparisons and illustrations do snot betray emotion. They read like the brilliant fancies of a man at ease with himself and with the world. Hazlitt has remarked en Herrick's Marginate love of jewellery, and he shows also a liking for silks, ribbons, and scents. That such a man should have preferred the joyous feasts of poets in London, feasts pre- sided over by Ben Jenson, to the monotony of a rural retreat in Devonshire is not surprising ; and yet it seems probable that Herrick's dislike to Dean Prior, was in a measure feigned, since no poet of his age, unless we except Ben Jonson, has sung so happily of rural delights. Mr. Palgrave has pointed out, and we do not remember seeing the remark before, that Herrick's vein in * Chrysontela : a Selection front Me Lyrical Poents of Robert Herrick. Arranged' 'with Notes, by Franois Turner Palgrave. London : Macmillan and Co. 1877,

natural description is prefigured in Jorison's odes "To Penshurst "

and to "Sir Robert Wroth." Ben Jonson's influence over his friend was no doubt powerful, and his weighty verses,—

" It is not growing like a tree

In bulk cloth make man better be,"

may have suggested the following lines by Herrick, written on himself. They are in a style which he seldom affects :—

" A wearied pilgrim I have wandered here, Twice five-and-twenty, bate me but one year; Long I have lasted in this world ; 'tie trno, But yet those years that I have lived, but few. Who by his grey hairs cloth his lustros toll Lives not those years, but he that lives them well: One man has reached his sixty years, but he Of all those three-score has not lived half three : He lives who lives to virtue ; men who cast Their ends for pleasure, do not live, but last."

We hardly think that Mr. Palgrave is correct in applying the term wood-notes wild" to even the slightest of Herrick's lyrics. Consummate art is more evident in his poems than untutored inspiration, and there can be little doubt that the " Hesperides " was the slow and carefully built-up work of years, and that it formed the main interest in life to this bachelor poet. Indeed the editor agrees with us in this view, for after writing on one page of the "wood-notes wild," he observes in the next that "Her- rick was no careless singer, but a true artist, working with con- scious knowledge of his art." And his anticipatidn of a literary immortality was expressed with the utmost confidence. He applies to himself the proud words of Horace, asserts that men shall read his lines while Love's fire shines upon his altar :—

"And learn'd musicians shall, to honour Herrick's

Fame and his name, both set and sing his lyrics."

So anxious was the poet to perfect his work, that he makes the following request to Julia :—

"Julia if I chance to die

Ere I print my poetry, I most humbly thee desire To commit it to the fire : Better 'twere my book were dead, Than to live not perfected."

Mr. Palgrave's judgment on English lyrical poetry is not likely to be contested, and on the whole, perhaps, though some exceptions will occur to every one, his judgment may be accepted that Her- rick's mastery over Nature and over Art "clearly assigns to him the first place as lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all who flourished during the interval between Henry V. and a hundred years since" :— " Single pieces," he writes, " of equal, a few of higher quality we have indeed meanwhile received, not only from the Master-singers who did not confine themselves to the lyric, but from many poets,— some the unknown contributors to our early anthologies, then Jenson, Marvell, Waller, Collins, and others, with whom we reaoh the beginning of the wider sweep which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work, not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herriek, es lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous, attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the period defined, has such unfailing freshness ; so much variety within the sphere prescribed to himself; such closeness to nature, whether in description or in feeling ; snob easy fitness in lan- guage; melody so unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much Ices frequent: he has more lines, in his own phrase, born of the royal blood ; the Innata rare non !task° verba'

are rarer with him ; although superficially mannered, nature is so much nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and interest through adherence to forme of feeling or fashions of thought now obso-

lete Here is no overstrain, no spasmodic cry, no wire-drawn analysis, or sensational rhetoric, no music Without sense, no mere second-hand literary inspiration' no mannered archaism,,—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation."

We may add, in recommending this selection from the works of a delightful poet, that Mr. Palgrave has grouped the lyrics under separate divisions, an arrangement which may perhaps prove of some service to the reader.