English Literature For Boys And Girls by H.E. Marshall

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"The crown of duty is our duty: Well--
Doing's the fruit of doing well. Farewell."

For eighteen years Herrick lived in his Devonshire home, and we
know little of these years. But he thought sadly at times of the
gay days that were gone. "Ah, Ben!" he writes to Jonson,
"Say how, or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun?
Where we such clusters had,
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each verse of thine
Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine."

Yet he was not without comforts and companions in his country
parsonage. His good and faithful servant Prue kept house for
him, and he surrounded himself with pets. He had a pet lamb, a
dog, a cat, and even a pet pig which he taught to drink out of a
mug.

"Though Clock,
To tell how night draws hence, I've none,
A Cock
I have, to sing how day draws on.
I have
A maid (my Prue) by good luck sent,
To save
That little, Fates me gave or lent.
A Hen
I keep, which, creeking* day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A Goose
I have, which, with a jealous ear,
Lets loose
Her tongue, to tell what danger's near.
A Lamb
I keep, tame, with my morsels fed,
Whose Dam
An orphan left him, lately dead.
A Cat
I keep, that plays about my house,
Grown fat
With eating many a miching** mouse.
To these
A Tracy*** I do keep, whereby
I please
The more my rural privacy,
Which are
But toys to give my heart some ease;
Where care
None is, slight things do lightly please."

*Clucking.
**Thieving.
***His spaniel.

But Herrick did not love his country home and parish or his
people. We are told that the gentry round about loved him "for
his florid and witty discourses." But his people do not seem to
have loved these same discourses, for we are also told that one
day in anger he threw his sermon from the pulpit at them because
they did not listen attentively. He says:--

"More discontents I never had,
Since I was born, than here,
Where I have been, and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire."

Yet though Herrick hated Devonshire, or at least said so, it was
this same wild country that called forth some of his finest
poems. He himself knew that, for in the next lines he goes on to
say:--

"Yet justly, too, I must confess
I ne'er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the press,
Than where I loathed so much."

Yet it is not the ruggedness of the Devon land we feel in
Herrick's poems. We feel rather the beauty of flowers, the
warmth of sun, the softness of spring winds, and see the greening
trees, the morning dews, the soft rains. It is as if he had not
let his eyes wander over the wild Devonshire moorlands, but had
confined them to his own lovely garden and orchard meadow, for he
speaks of the "dew-bespangled herb and tree," the "damasked
meadows," the "silver shedding brooks." Hardly any English poet
has written so tenderly of flowers as Herrick. One of the best
known of these flower poems is To Daffodils.

"Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the Even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again."

And here is part of a song for May morning:--

"Get up, get up for shame, the blooming morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.

See how Aurora throws her fair
Fresh-quilted colours through the air:
Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree,
Each flower has wept and bow'd toward the east
Above an hour since; yet you not dress'd;
Nay! not so much as out of bed?
When all the birds have matins said
And sung their thankful hymns, 'tis sin,
Nay, profanation to keep in,
Whenas a thousand virgins on this day
Spring, sooner than the lark to fetch in May.

Rise and put on your foliage, and be seen
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and green
And sweet as Flora. Take no care
For jewels for your gown or hair;
Fear not; the leaves will strew
Gems in abundance upon you:
Besides, the childhood of the day has kept,
Against you come, some orient pearls unwept;
Come and receive them while the light
Hangs on the dew-locks of the night:
And Titan on the eastern hill
Retires himself, or else stands still
Till you come forth. Wash, dress, be brief in praying;
Few beads are best when once we go a-Maying."

Another well-known poem of Herrick's is:--

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer:
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry."

Herrick only published one book. He called it The Hesperides, or
the works both Human and Divine. The "divine" part although
published in the same book, has a separate name, being called his
Noble Numbers. The Hesperides, from whom he took the name of his
book, were lovely maidens who dwelt in a beautiful garden far
away on the verge of the ocean. The maidens sang beautifully, so
Herrick took their name for his book, for it might well be that
the songs they sang were such as his. This garden of the
Hesperides was sometimes thought to be the same as the fabled
island of Atlantis of which we have already heard. And it was
here that, guarded by a dreadful dragon, grew the golden apples
which Earth gave to Hera on her marriage with Zeus.

The Hesperides is a collection of more than a thousand short
poems, a few of which you have already read in this chapter.
They are not connected with each other, but tell of all manner of
things.

Herrick was a religious poet too, and here is something that he
wrote for children in his Noble Numbers. It is called To his
Saviour, a Child: A Present by a Child.

"Go, pretty child, and bear this flower
Unto thy little Saviour;
And tell him, by that bud now blown,
He is the Rose of Sharon known.
When thou hast said so, stick it there
Upon his bib or stomacher;
And tell Him, for good hansel too,
That thou hast brought a whistle new,
Made of a clear, straight oaten reed,
To charm his cries at time of need.
Tell Him, for coral, thou hast none,
But if thou hadst, He should have one;
But poor thou art, and known to be
Even as moneyless as He.
Lastly, if thou canst win a kiss
From those mellifluous lips of His;
Then never take a second one,
To spoil the first impression."

Herrick wrote also several graces for children. Here is one:--

"What God gives, and what we take
'Tis a gift for Christ His sake:
Be the meal of beans and peas,
God be thanked for those and these:
Have we flesh, or have we fish,
All are fragments from His dish.
He His Church save, and the king;
And our peace here, like a Spring,
Make it ever flourishing."

While Herrick lived his quiet, dull life and wrote poetry in the
depths of Devonshire, the country was being torn asunder and
tossed from horror to horror by the great Civil War. Men took
sides and fought for Parliament or for King. Year by year the
quarrel grew. What was begun at Edgehill ended at Naseby where
the King's cause was utterly lost. Then, although Herrick took
no part in the fighting, he suffered with the vanquished, for he
was a Royalist at heart. He was turned out of his living to make
room for a Parliament man. He left this parish without regret.
"Deanbourne, farewell; I never look to see
Deane, or thy warty incivility.
Thy rocky bottom, that doth tear thy streams,
And makes them frantic, ev'n to all extremes;
To my content, I never should behold,
Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover
Thy men: and rocky are thy ways all over.
O men, O manners, now and ever known
To be a rocky generation:
A people currish; churlish as the seas;
And rude, almost, as rudest savages:
With whom I did, and may re-sojourn when
Rocks turn to rivers, rivers turn to men."

Hastening to London, he threw off his sober priest's robe, and
once more putting on the gay dress worn by the gentlemen of his
day he forgot the troubles and the duties of a country parson.

Rejoicing in his freedom he cried:--

"London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment;
Yet since called back; henceforward let me be,
O native country, repossess'd by thee."

He had no money, but he had many wealthy friends, so he lived, we
may believe, merrily enough for the next fifteen years. It was
during these years that the Hesperides was first published,
although for a long time before many people had known his poems,
for they had been handed about among his friends in manuscript.

So the years passed for Herrick we hardly know how. In the great
world Cromwell died and Charles II returned to England to claim
the throne of his fathers. Then it would seem that Herrick had
not found all the joy he had hoped for in London, for two years
later, although rocks had not turned to rivers, nor rivers to
men, he went back to his "loathed Devonshire."

After that, all that we know of him is that at Dean Prior "Robert
Herrick vicker was buried ye 15th day of October 1674." Thus in
twilight ends the life of the greatest lyric poet of the
seventeenth century.

All the lyric poets of whom I have told you were Royalists, but
the Puritans too had their poets, and before ending this chapter
I would like to tell you a little of Andrew Marvell, a
Parliamentary poet.

If Herrick was a lover of flowers, Marvell was a lover of
gardens, woods and meadows. The garden poet he has been called.
He felt himself in touch with Nature:--

"Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer,

And little now to make me wants,
Or of the fowls or of the plants:
Give me but wings as they, and I
Straight floating in the air shall fly;
Or turn me but, and you shall see
I was but an inverted tree."*

*Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax.

Yet although Marvell loved Nature, he did not live, like Herrick,
far from the stir of war, but took his part in the strife of the
times. He was an important man in his day. He was known to
Cromwell and was a friend of Milton, a poet much greater than
himself. He was a member of Parliament, and wrote much prose,
but the quarrels in the cause of which it was written are matters
of bygone days, and although some of it is still interesting, it
is for his poetry rather that we remember and love him. Although
Marvell was a Parliamentarian, he did not love Cromwell blindly,
and he could admire what was fine in King Charles. He could say
of Cromwell:--

"Though his Government did a tyrant resemble,
He made England great, and his enemies tremble."*

*A dialogue between two Horses.

And no one perhaps wrote with more grave sorrow of the death of
Charles than did Marvell, and that too in a poem which, strangely
enough, was written in honor of Cromwell.

"He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try:
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head,
Down, as upon a bed."*

*An Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland.

At Cromwell's death he wrote:--

"Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse
Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse;
Singing of thee, inflame himself to fight
And, with the name of Cromwell, armies fright."*

*Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.

But all Marvell's writings were not political, and one of his
prettiest poems was written about a girl mourning for a lost pet.

"The wanton troopers riding by
Have shot my fawn, and it will die.

Ungentle men! they cannot thrive
who killed thee. Thou ne'er didst alive
Them any harm: alas! nor could
Thy death yet do them any good.
. . . . .
With sweetest milk and sugar, first
I it at my own fingers nurs'd;
And as it grew, so every day
It wax'd more sweet and white than they.
It had so sweet a breath! And oft
I blushed to see its foot so soft,
And white (shall I say than my hand?)
Nay, any lady's of the land.
It is a wondrous thing how fleet
'Twas on those little silver feet;
With what a pretty skipping grace
It oft would challenge me to race;
And when 't had left me far away,
'Twould stay, and run again, and stay;
For it was nimbler much than hinds,
And trod as if on the four winds.
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;
And all the spring-time of the year
It only loved to be there.
Among the lilies, I
Have sought it oft, where it should lie
Yet could not, till itself would rise,
Find it, although before mine eyes;
For in the flaxen lilies' shade,
It like a bank of lilies laid.
Upon the roses it would feed,
Until its lips even seemed to bleed;
And then to me 'twould boldly trip
And plant those roses on my lip.
. . . . .
Now my sweet fawn in vanish'd to
Whither the swans and turtles go;
In fair Elysium to endure,
With milk-white lambs and ermines pure,
O do not run too fast: for I
Will but bespeak thy grave, and die."

After the Restoration Marvell wrote satires, a kind of poem of
which you had an early and mild example in the fable of the two
mice by Surrey, a kind of poem of which we will soon hear much
more. In these satires Marvell poured out all the wrath of a
Puritan upon the evils of his day. Marvell's satires were so
witty and so outspoken that once or twice he was in danger of
punishment because of them. But once at least the King himself
saved a book of his from being destroyed, for by every one "from
the King down to the tradesman his books were read with great
pleasure."* Yet he had many enemies, and when he died suddenly
in August, 1678, many people though that he had been poisoned.
He was the last, we may say, of the seventeenth-century lyric
poets.

*Burnet.

Besides the lyric writers there were many prose writers in the
seventeenth century who are among the men to be remembered. But
their books, although some day you will love them, would not
interest you yet. They tell no story, they are long, they have
not, like poetry, a lilt or rhythm to carry one on. It would be
an effort to read them. If I tried to explain to you wherein the
charm of them lies I fear the charm would fly, for it is
impossible to imprison the sunbeam or find the foundations of the
rainbow. It is better therefore to leave these books until the
years to come in which it will be no effort to read them, but a
joy.

Chapter LVII MILTON--SIGHT AND GROWTH

"THERE is but one Milton,"* there is, too, but one Shakespeare,
yet John Milton, far more than William Shakespeare, stands a
lonely figure in our literature. Shakespeare was a dramatist
among dramatists. We can see how there were those who led up to
him, and others again who led away from him. From each he
differs in being greater, he outshines them all. Shakespeare was
a man among men. He loved and sinned with men, he was homely and
kindly, and we can take him to our hearts. Milton both in his
life and work was cold and lonely. He was a master without
scholars, a leader without followers. Him we can admire, but
cannot love with an understanding love. Yet although we love
Shakespeare we can find throughout all his works hardly a line
upon which we can place a finger and say here Shakespeare speaks
of himself, here he shows what he himself thought and felt.
Shakespeare understood human nature so well that he could see
through another's eyes and so forget himself. But over and over
again in Milton's work we see himself. Over and over again we
can say here Milton speaks of himself, here he shows us his own
heart, his own pain. He is one of the most self-ful of all
poets. He has none of the dramatic power of Shakespeare, he
cannot look through another's eyes, so he sees things only from
one standpoint and that his own. He stands far apart from us,
and is almost inhumanly cold. That is the reason why so many of
us find him hard to love.

*Professor Raleigh.

When, on a bleak December day in 1606, more than three hundred
years ago, Milton was born, Elizabeth was dead, and James of
Scotland sat upon the throne, but many of the great Elizabethans
still lived. Shakespeare was still writing, still acting,
although he had become a man of wealth and importance and the
owner of New Place. Ben Jonson was at the very height of his
fame, the favorite alike of Court and Commons. Bacon was just
rising to power and greatness, his Novum Organum still to come.
Raleigh, in prison, was eating his heart out in the desire for
freedom, trying to while away the dreary hours with chemical
experiments, his great history not yet begun. Of the crowd of
lyric writers some were boys at college, some but children in the
nursery, and some still unborn. Yet in spite of the many writers
who lived at or about the same time, Milton stands alone in our
literature.

John Milton was the son of a London scrivener, that is, a kind of
lawyer. He was well-to-do and a Puritan. Milton's home,
however, must have been brighter than many a Puritan home, for
his father loved music, and not only played well, but also
composed. He taught his son to play too, and all through his
life Milton loved music.

John was a pretty little boy with long golden brown hair, a fair
face and dark gray eyes. But to many a strict Puritan, beauty
was an abomination, and we are told that one of Milton's
schoolmasters "was a Puritan in Essex who cut his hair short."
No doubt to him a boy with long hair was unseemly. John was the
eldest and much beloved son of his father, who perhaps petted and
spoiled him. He was clever as well as pretty, and already at the
age of ten he was looked upon by his family as a poet. He was
very studious, for besides going to St. Paul's School he had a
private tutor. Even with that he was not satisfied, but studied
alone far into the night. "When he went to schoole, when he was
very young," we are told, "he studied hard and sate up very late:
commonly till twelve or one at night. And his father ordered the
mayde to sitt up for him. And in those years he composed many
copies of verses, which might well become a riper age."* We can
imagine to ourselves the silence of the house, when all the
Puritan household had been long abed. We can picture the warm
quiet room where sits the little fair-haired boy poring over his
books by the light of flickering candles, while in the shadow a
stern-faced white-capped Puritan woman waits. She sits very
straight in her chair, her worn hands are folded, her eyes heavy
with sleep. Sometimes she nods. Then with a start she shakes
herself wide awake again, murmuring softly that it is no hour for
any Christian body to be out o' bed, wondering that her master
should allow so young a child to keep so long over his books.
Still she has her orders, so with a patient sigh she folds her
hands again and waits. Thus early did Milton begin to shape his
own course and to live a life apart from others.

*Aubrey.

At sixteen Milton went to Christ's College, Cambridge. And here
he earned for himself the name of the Lady of Christ's, both
because of his beautiful face and slender figure, and because he
stood haughtily aloof from amusements which seemed to him coarse
or bad. In going to Cambridge, Milton had meant to study for the
Church. But all through life he stood for liberty. "He thought
that man was made only for rebellion," said a later writer.* As
a child he had gone his own way, and as he grew older he found it
harder and harder to agree with all that the Church taught--"till
coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had
invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must
subscribe slaves, and take an oath withal. . . . I thought it
better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of
speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." Thus
was he, he says, "church-outed by the Prelates."* Milton could
not, with a free conscience, become a clergyman, so having taken
his degree he went home to his father, who now lived in the
country at Horton. He left Cambridge without regrets. No thrill
of pleasure seemed to have warmed his heart in after days when he
looked back upon the young years spent beside the Cam.

*The Reason of Church Government, book II.

Milton went home to his father's house without any settled plan
of life. He had not made up his mind what he was to be, he was
only sure that he could not be a clergyman. His father was well
off, but not wealthy. He had no great estates to manage, and he
must have wished his eldest son to do and be something in the
world, yet he did not urge it upon him. Milton himself, however,
was not quite at rest, as his sonnet On his being arrived to the
age of twenty-three shows:--

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year:
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late Spring no bud or blossom show'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arriv'd so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean, or high,
Toward which Time leads me; and the Will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."

Yet dissatisfied as he sometimes was, he was very sure of
himself, and for five years he let his wings grow, as he himself
said. But these years were not altogether lost, for if both day
and night Milton roamed the meadows about his home in seeming
idleness, he was drinking in all the beauty of earth and sky,
flower and field, storing his memory with sights and sounds that
were to be a treasure to him in after days. He studied hard,
too, ranging at will through Greek and Latin literature. "No
delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me
aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it
were, some great period of my studies," he says to a friend. And
as the outcome of these five fallow years Milton has left us some
of his most beautiful poems. They have not the stately grandeur
of his later works, but they are natural and easy, and at times
full of a joyousness which we never find in him again. And
before we can admire his great poem which he wrote later, we may
love the beauty of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, which he
wrote now.

L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are two poems which picture two moods
in which the poet looks at life. They are two moods which come
to every one, the mirthful and the sad. L'Allegro pictures the
happy mood. Here the man "who has, in his heart, cause for
contentment" sings. And the poem fairly dances with delight of
being as it follows the day from dawn till evening shadows fall.
It begins by bidding "loathed Melancholy" begone "'Mongst horrid
shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy," and by bidding come
"heart-easing Mirth."

"Haste, thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks, and wretched smiles.
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe.
. . . . .
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise."