The Hesperides Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 | Page 2

incomparable
age or generation, has matched them again and again. As a creative and
inventive singer, he surpasses all his rivals in quantity of good work; in
quality of spontaneous instinct and melodious inspiration he reminds us,
by frequent and flawless evidence, who above all others must beyond
all doubt have been his first master and his first model in lyric
poetry--the author of "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love".
The last of his line, he is and will probably be always the first in rank
and station of English song-writers. We have only to remember how
rare it is to find a perfect song, good to read and good to sing,
combining the merits of Coleridge and Shelley with the capabilities of
Tommy Moore and Haynes Bayly, to appreciate the unique and

unapproachable excellence of Herrick. The lyrist who wished to be a
butterfly, the lyrist who fled or flew to a lone vale at the hour (whatever
hour it may be) "when stars are weeping," have left behind them such
stuff as may be sung, but certainly cannot be read and endured by any
one with an ear for verse. The author of the Ode on France and the

author of the Ode to the West Wind have left us hardly more than a
song a-piece which has been found fit for setting to music: and, lovely
as they are, the fame of their authors does not mainly depend on the
song of Glycine or the song of which Leigh Hunt so justly and so
critically said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the
kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his
songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified
and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or
epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but
nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer--as surely as
Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist--ever born of English race. The
apparent or external variety of his versification is, I should suppose,
incomparable; but by some happy tact or instinct he was too naturally
unambitious to attempt, like Jonson, a flight in the wake of Pindar. He
knew what he could not do: a rare and invaluable gift. Born a blackbird
or a thrush, he did not take himself (or try) to be a nightingale.
It has often been objected that he did mistake himself for a sacred poet:
and it cannot be denied that his sacred verse at its worst is as offensive
as his secular verse at its worst; nor can it be denied that no severer
sentence of condemnation can be passed upon any poet's work. But
neither Herbert nor Crashaw could have bettered such a divinely
beautiful triplet as this:--
"We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who with His sunshine and
His showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers".
That is worthy of Miss Rossetti herself: and praise of such work can go
no higher.
But even such exquisite touches or tones of colour may be too often
repeated in fainter shades or more glaring notes of assiduous and facile
reiteration. The sturdy student who tackles his Herrick as a schoolboy
is expected to tackle his Horace, in a spirit of pertinacious and stolid
straightforwardness, will probably find himself before long so
nauseated by the incessant inhalation of spices and flowers, condiments
and kisses, that if a musk-rat had run over the page it could hardly be

less endurable to the physical than it is to the spiritual stomach. The
fantastic and the brutal blemishes which deform and deface the
loveliness of his incomparable genius are hardly so damaging to his
fame as his general monotony of matter and of manner. It was
doubtless in order to relieve this saccharine and "mellisonant"
monotony that he thought fit to intersperse these interminable
droppings of natural or artificial perfume with others of the rankest and
most intolerable odour: but a diet of alternate sweetmeats and emetics
is for the average of eaters and drinkers no less unpalatable than
unwholesome. It is useless and thankless to enlarge on such faults or
such defects, as it would be useless and senseless to ignore. But how to
enlarge, to expatiate, to insist on the charm of Herrick at his best--a
charm so incomparable and so inimitable that even English poetry can
boast of nothing quite like it or worthy to be named after it--the most
appreciative reader will be the slowest to affirm or imagine that he can
conjecture. This, however, he will hardly fail to remark: that Herrick,
like most if not all other lyric poets, is not best known by his best work.
If we may judge by frequency of quotation or of reference, the ballad of
the ride from Ghent