To all true lovers of old English poetry the name of Robert Herrick sounds pleasant and refreshing. There is an indefinable charm in the very title of his work, the Hesperides, suggestive of exuberant fancy and vivid play of imagination, which transports the reader from the dull realities of passing life to the regions of fairy land. Not that the domain of Herrick’s genius lay exclusively in the realms of fable, for he was eminently a poet of nature, who drank deeply and eagerly at her purest streams; but in his hands the beauties of creation are surrounded with an atmosphere of romance, which, without detracting from the truthfulness of his poetry, gives a tinge of the unreal to its subjects. An associate with, and humble follower, of that giant race, whose names are our nation’s boast, he ranks as a lyric poet among the first of his age. Some of his happiest effusions are perfectly Horatian in their joyous glee and graceful abandonment to the humour of the moment; many are direct imitations of the Latin poet, who has seldom had



a more congenial admirer. The metre of the Hesperides is as varied as the range of subjects; sometimes, though not often, degenerating into a fanciful distortion of verse, whose chief merit, if merit it can be called, is its quaintness.

Into this garden then, guarded by no watchful dragon, but graced with forms and images of beauty, let us stray for a while, culling here and there a flower from the clusters which the poet has scattered with no grudging hand, and catching at intervals a passing glance at that ideal world, with which the fancy of our forefathers surrounded the objects of nature. Let not the uninitiated hope to find here the smooth-shaven lawn and trim parterre, intersected by walks of formal curve. It is rather a very wilderness of sweets, in which all forms of vegetation are rankly luxuriant, and in which the eye is offended by the noisome weed springing up side by side with the fragrant blossoms of the flowers.

But before entering, let us make acquaintance with the hierophant of these mysteries. For the materials of his life we are indebted to the parish registers, a few of his letters, scattered allusions in his poems, and some traditions which have survived the lapse of two centuries among the people of Devonshire. From these scanty materials it may be readily conceived that few details of his personal history can be gleaned; in fact, scarcely more than sufficient to supply the most meagre outline. Descended from an old Leicestershire family, who wrote their names indifferently Eyrick, Heryck, Heyrick, Hearick, and Herrick, the poet’s father followed the calling of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and in 1582 married Julia Stone of Seghenoe. Four sons were the issue of this marriage, and of these Robert, the third, was born in 1591, and baptized in the church of St. Nicholas Vedast, on the anniversary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. On Lord Mayor’s day in the following year his father fell from a window of his house, and died in consequence of the injuries he sustained. Whether this melancholy event was the result of accident or premeditation is not certain. His will by a singular, if not suspicious, coincidence, had been made but two days previously.

Thus deprived of his natural protector, young Herrick was left with his brothers to the guardianship of an uncle. Of his youth we find no traces, except that it appears to have been passed in London. He is supposed to have been educated at Westminster, on no stronger ground than a passing allusion to his “beloved Westminster” in his “Tears to Thamesis,” in which he laments his absence from the place of his birth. If this supposition were correct he would probably have been a schoolfellow of George Herbert, who was only a few months his senior, and to whose poetry his own sacred pieces bear considerable resemblance. From the fact of his having entered his twenty-fifth year before his name appears as a fellow commoner upon the



books of St. John’s College, Cambridge, it has perhaps also been inferred with equal reason that his education was neglected. From St. John’s he migrated to Trinity Hall, for the purpose of studying law, but ultimately took his degree in arts. In a letter written to his uncle at this period he says, “Forasmuch as my continuance will not long consist in the sphere where I now move, I make known my thoughts, and modestly crave your counsel, whether it were better for me to direct my study towards the law or not; which if I should (as it will not be impertinent) I can with facility labour myself into another college appointed for the like end and study, where I assure myself the charge will not be so great as where I now exist.” In another dated from Trinity Hall after making the contemplated change, he writes, “I hope I have (as I presume you know) changed my college for one where the quantity of expense will be shortened, by reason of the privacy of the house, where I propose to live recluse till time contract me to some other calling, striving now with myself (retaining upright thoughts) both sparingly to live, thereby to shun the current of expense.” In most of his letters which are extant the burden of his song is, as in similar productions to this day, a remittance. On one occasion he apologizes for his repeated applications of this nature, wishing that “charges had leaden wings and tortoise feet to come upon him. That which makes my letter to be abortive and born before maturity, is and hath been my commencement, which I have now overgrown, though I confess with many a throe and pinches of the purse; but it was necessary, and the prize was worthy the hazard; which makes me less sensible of the expense, by reason of a titular prerogative— et bonum est prodire in bono” The signature to this is “Hopeful R. Hearick, Cambr. April 1617.”

For the next twelve years we again lose sight of the poet, and it is only from occasional glimpses in his writings that we can form a conjecture as to his mode of life. It was probably during this period that he formed an acquaintance with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and other choice spirits, whose convivialities he commemorates in an ode to the memory of the former.

• “Ah! Ben
• 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
• 10 Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”

Perhaps he was a member of the famous Mermaid Club, founded by Raleigh, to which both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson belonged. It is not impossible that he may have been an eager spectator of some of the wit-combats between these two illustrious worthies, to which old Fuller alludes with his usual quaintness in a well-known passage. “Many were the wit-combats betwixt him (Shakespeare) and Ben Jonson; which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in performance; Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but higher in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.” But it is difficult to believe that, had such been the case, we should not have had some record left in Herrick’s writings of these memorable evenings; and, great as was his admiration for Ben, he could not fail to have been fascinated by his more illustrious rival. Shakespeare died while Herrick was at Cambridge,



and the intimacy of the latter with the members of the Mermaid club seems to have dated from a subsequent period.

To scenes such as these does Beaumont refer, in his letter to Ben Jonson, when he exclaims,

• “What things have we seen
• Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
• So nimble, and so full of subtile flame,
• As if that every one from whence they came
• Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
• And had resolved to live a fool the rest
• Of his dull life.”

It was in this gay company, whose reckless dissipation was in keeping with the fashion of the times, that Herrick acquired habits which rendered the seclusion of his after life irksome, and unfitted him for the proper exercise of his sacred calling. Many a longing look did he cast in after years, from his little parsonage at Dean Prior, upon these noctes cœnæque deorum, the evenings with the players in Bankside. Glorious nights they must have been, and never again will such a company of Bacchanals assemble. There sat big, burly, blustering Ben, lording it with a sway as despotic as was ever held by his great namesake at the Literary club. What flashes of humour, what torrents of overpowering dogmatic eloquence, thundered forth with an emphasis that none ventured to dispute. And how, when hard pressed, he would drown all argument with some pompous quotation. And then what huge cups of Canary he would quaff, like a very Silenus, till his less strongheaded companions dropped off one by one, and Ben was left alone, and rolled off to his house in Bankside, waking the echoes with snatches of some drinking song. Massinger was there, battling hard with poverty, gentle and uncomplaining, more refined, though less jovial, than his more fortunate contemporaries, but living and struggling on, modest and retiring, and dying as he lived, “a stranger.” There too was Ford, “with folded arms and melancholy hat,” somewhat morose in his exterior, but genial and kindly withal. Beaumont died in the same year as Shakespeare, 1616. Herrick bestows a passing notice upon him, in conjunction with his colleague Fletcher, in a poem entitled, “The apparition of his mistress calling him to Elysium.” After enumerating the heroes and worthies of antiquity whom he will there meet; Homer,

• “About whose throne the crowd of poets throng;
• To hear the incantation of his tongue,
• Then stately Virgil, witty Ovid,”

and others, she continues,

• “Thou shalt there
• Behold them in a spacious theatre.
• Among which glories, crown’d with sacred bays,
• And flattering ivy, two recite their plays,
• Beaumont and Fletcher, swans, to whom all ears
• Listen, while they, like syrens in their spheres,
• Sing their Evadne.”

But Ben Jonson was the hero of his worship, whose glory in his eyes eclipsed the lustre of all meaner constellations. Proceeding with the quotation,

• “And still more for thee
• There still remains to know, than thou canst see
• By glimmering of a fancy: do but come,
• And there I’ll shew thee that capacious room,
• In which thy father Jonson now is placed,
• As in a globe of radiant fire, and graced
• To be in that orb crown’d, that doth include
• Those prophets of the former magnitude,
• And be one chief.”

His death, in Herrick’s esteem, was fatal to the theatrical profession. Witness his lament.

• “After the rare Arch-poet Jonson died,
• The sock grew loathsome, and the buskin’s pride,
• Together with the stage’s glory, stood
• Each like a poor and pitied widowhood.
• The cirque profaned was, and all postures rack’d,



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• For men did strut, and stride, and stare, not act.
• Then temper flew from words, and men did squeak,
• Look red, and blow, and bluster, but not speak.
• No holy rage, or frantic fires did stir
• 10Or flash about the spacious theatre.
• No clap of hands, or shout, or praise’s proof
• Did crack the playhouse sides, or cleave her roof.
• Artless the scene was, and that monstrous sin
• Of deep and arrant ignorance came in;
• Such ignorance as theirs was, who once hiss’d
• At thy unequall’d play, the Alchymist.”

But the time is come when he must quit these haunts of revelry and wit, and prepare himself for that profession which seems to have been his only resource. Like other literary men of his day, Herrick won golden favours from the noble patrons of literature. Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, the favourite of James the First, and a scion of a house not undistinguished in literary history, appears to have extended his munificence to the poet; for which his memory is graced by a place in the bede-roll of illustrious names, as one who turned the poet’s lines to gold. The Earl of Dorset is addressed as one “whose smile can make a poet.” In the absence of any direct evidence on the subject, some allusions in the Hesperides would seem to indicate that, at some period of his life, Herrick had been a hanger-on at court. We know that in 1629 he was presented by the King to the vicarage of Dean Prior in Devonshire, on the elevation of Dr. Potter to the bishopric of Carlisle. This may have been the reward of frequent appeals. Certainly no professed courtier would have been ashamed of the following verses, “To the King, to cure the evil,” written in the hyperbolical language of the day.

• “ To find that Tree of Life, whose fruits did feed,
• And leaves did heal, all sick of human seed;
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• To find Bethesda, and an angel there,
• Stirring the waters, I am come,”

and so on in the same strain. The little matrimonial differences between Charles the First and his Queen, which were chiefly owing to her refusal to share his coronation, furnished Herrick with a theme for his pen. He addresses them in the language of prophecy.

• “Like streams you are divorced, but ’twill come, when
• These eyes of mine shall see you mix again.
• Thus speaks the oak here; C. and M. shall meet,
• Treading on amber with their silver feet;
• Nor will’t be long ere this accomplish’d be;
• The words found true, C. M. remember me.”

This was evidently written before 1628, the year in which Buckingham, whose object it was to widen the breach between the royal pair, was assassinated by Felton.

The supposition that Herrick was a courtier, may perhaps explain the allusion to his “beloved Westminster” mentioned above, more especially as in some lines to the “Lady Mary Villiers, Governess to the Princess Henrietta,” which were written probably in 1644, he entreats her:

• “For my sake, who ever did prefer
• You above all those sweets of Westminster,
• Permit my book to have a free access
• To kiss your hand, most dainty governess.”

There is something that smacks of the royal drawing-room in the following: “Upon a Black Twist rounding the Arm of the Countess of Carlisle,” first lady of the bedchamber to Queen Henrietta Maria:

• “I saw about her spotless wrist,
• Of blackest jet, a curious twist;
• Which circumvolving gently, there
• Enthrall’d her arm as prisoner.
• Dark was the jail, but as if light
• Had met t’engender with the night;
• Or so, as darkness made a stay,
• To show at once both night and day.
• I fancy more, but if there be
• 10Such freedom in captivity,
• I beg of love that ever I
• May in like chains of darkness lie.”

The Countess always dressed in deep black to contrast with the whiteness of her complexion, and in a miniature, which was sold at Strawberry Hill, she is represented in an enormous round black hat. Waller describes her as

• “A Venus rising from a sea of jet.”

“The honoured M. Endymion Porter, Groom of the Bedchamber to his Majesty,” was one of Herrick’s most familiar friends, and a great patron of letters. He accompanied “baby Charles” and “Steenie” on their journey to Spain in 1623, and it was for him that Herrick composed the pastoral dialogue with himself, under the name of Lycidas. Endymion complains of the silence of his muse:

• “Ah! Lycidas, come tell why
• Thy whilome merry oat
• By thee doth so neglected lie,
• And never purls a note?”

Lycidas, in return, implores him to leave the court and its uncongenial employments. Endymion consents:

• “Dear Lycidas, ere long,
• I vow by Pan, to come away
• And pipe unto thy song.
• Then Jessamine, with Florabell,
• And dainty Amarillis,
• With handsome-handed Drosomell,
• Shall prank thy brook with lilies.”

Whether the attractions of his friend’s society induced him to haunt the purlieus of the court, or whether his attendance was for more interested motives, must be left, as it is, matter of mere conjecture. Julia, Sappho, Anthea, Electra, and the rest, the inspiring heroines of his song, may have been celebrated court beauties, whose charms in turn fascinated him, or they may have been purely imaginary mistresses, mere names to hang a verse upon; for a poet, like a young knight in the ages of chivalry, was obliged to have some real or pretended object of adoration, some Dulcinea whose pre-eminent beauty he vindicated, and whose favour it was his aim to achieve. Perhaps the following lines were written at the conclusion of a London season:

• “I have lost, and lately, these
• Many dainty mistresses:
• Stately Julia, prime of all,
• Sappho neat, a principal;
• Smooth Anthea, for a skin
• White, and heaven-like crystalline;
• Sweet Electra, and the choice
• Myrrha, for the lute and voice;
• Next, Corinna, for her wit,
• 10And the graceful use of it,
• With Perilla, all are gone;
• Only Herrick’s left alone,
• For to number sorrow by
• Their departures hence, and die.”

But while indulging in speculations as to what might have been Herrick’s mode of life in London, the few real facts of his history must not be forgotten. His presentation to the living of Dean Prior, though in all probability the result of his own application, does not appear to have afforded him much pleasure. Like Sidney Smith in the middle of Salisbury Plain, or in his secluded parsonage at Foston le Clay, he was banished from the society of his most congenial friends, to spend his days among a people as rough and uncultivated as the country they inhabited. His first impressions of them were not flattering, and after an experience of nearly twenty years, he takes leave of “Dean Bourn, a rude river in Devon, by which sometimes he lived,” in this uncomplimentary strain:

• “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 salvages:
• With whom I did, and may resojourn, when
• Rocks turn to rivers, rivers turn to men.”

The last sentiments he repeats in an ode to his household gods:

• “Let us make our best abode,
• Where human foot, as yet, ne’er trod:
• Search worlds of ice, and rather there
• Dwell, than in loathed Devonshire.”

But unpromising as were his prospects of happiness in this dreary locality, he did not quit it till he was ejected by the parliament in 1648. To this period of nineteen years may be referred most of his pieces which have merely a



local interest, and are addressed to various individuals in the county with whom he lived on terms of intimacy. It was also during this interval of retirement that a great part of his “Noble Numbers” were written, as may be inferred from his “Discontents in Devon.”

• “More discontents I never had
• Since I was born, than here;
• Where I have been, and still am sad,
• In this dull Devonshire:
• Yet justly too I must confess
• I ne’er invented such
• Ennobled numbers for the press,
• Than where I loathed so much.”

His household was not large. A pet lamb, a spaniel, Tracy, a cat, and a sparrow who rejoiced in the name of Phil, shared his meals; and the former were probably the companions of his walks. But the presiding genius of all was his faithful old servant, Prudence Baldwin, whose unalterable attachment and domestic virtues he celebrates in more than one verse:

• “These summer birds did wish thy master stay
• The times of warmth, but then they flew away;
• Leaving their poet, being now grown old,
• Exposed to all the coming winter’s cold:
• But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide
• As well the winter’s as the summer’s tide;
• For which thy love, live with thy master here,
• Not two, but all the seasons of the year.”

In grateful remembrance of her faithful services he wrote her epitaph:

• “In this little urn is laid
• Prudence Baldwin (once my maid),
• From whose happy spark here let
• Spring the purple violet.”

Tradition adds, says Southey, “that he kept a pet pig, which he taught to drink out of a tankard.” His retired mode of life probably gave him a character for eccentricity among his neighbours, and the gossip of the country folk exaggerated any little singularities of behaviour. A man of kindly warmth of feeling, as Herrick must have been, would find more sympathy in the society of his dumb favourites than among the boors of his parish, and their memory has been honoured with a place in his “Poetic Liturgy.” The death of Phil, the sparrow, is made the subject of a dirge, in which he is compared with the bird made illustrious by the tears of Lesbia. It concludes with the invocation,

• “ But endless peace sit here, and keep
• My Phil the time he has to sleep,
• And thousand virgins come and weep,
• To make these flowery carpets show
• Fresh as their blood, and ever grow
• Till passengers shall spend their doom,
• Not Virgil’s gnat had such a tomb.”

Tracy, too, came in for his share of immortality.

Of his parsonage we have an interior, limned by himself:

• “Like as my parlour, so my hall
• And kitchen’s small;
• A little buttery, and therein
• A little bin,
• Which keeps my little loaf of bread
• Unchipt, unflead:
• Some little sticks of thorn or briar
• Make me a fire,
• Close by whose living coal I sit
• 10And glow like it.”

If it were allowable to speculate a little as to his daily habits, gleaning the few hints he has left in his poems, we should imagine him as not a very early riser, temperate in eating and drinking more from necessity than choice, and, above all, genial and hearty in the enjoyment of social intercourse. In person he was probably about the middle size, with a waist of comfortable proportions, and a tendency to scrofula, which was perhaps the cause of “his farewell to sack” as much as the weakness of head of which he complains. By his own testimony he was weak-sighted, or as he calls it himself, “mop-eyed,” and had by some accident lost a finger. One would almost suppose him a vegetarian when he speaks of

• “The worts, the purslain, and the mess of watercress.”

which, with his “beloved beet,” were the staple of his meals. But his frugality was a necessary consequence of limited means. At a dinner-table he was in his element. He left behind



him among the people of Devon the reputation of being a witty and sprightly talker, and his society was courted for the pleasure of his conversation. Wood tells us, that he “became much beloved among the gentry in those parts for his florid and witty discourses.” But the times of greatest enjoyment for him were the evenings when some pleasant friend would join him over a cup of canary, to read with him one of his favourite authors, and prolong the conviviality far into the night. These were days of rare occurrence, and deserved to be marked with white stones. A picture of one of them is contained in “An Ode to Sir Clipsby Crew,” inviting him to visit his cell.

• “Here we securely live, and eat
• The cream of meat;
• And keep eternal fires,
• By which we sit, and do divine
• As wine
• And rage inspires.

• If full, we charm; then call upon
• Anacreon
• To grace the frantic thyrse;
• 10 And having drunk, we raise a shout
• Throughout,
• To praise his verse.

• Then cause we Horace to be read,
• Which sung or said,
• A goblet to the brim,
• Of lyric wine, both swell’d and crown’d,
• A round
• We quaff to him.

• Thus, thus, we live, and spend the hours
• 20In wine and flowers;
• And make the frolic year,
• The month, the week, the instant day
• To stay
• The longer here.”

His ordinary way of life was, as he describes it himself, simple and plain. His mornings would be occupied partly with his farm, and partly with his parish duties; for there is no reason to imagine that in the discharge of his sacred functions he comported himself with other than the strictest decorum, although tradition does accuse him of swearing in his pulpit, and flinging his sermon at the congregation. This must have been an enemy’s tale, for throughout those of his poems, which are professedly of a religious character, there breathes a spirit of fervent and unaffected piety and sober seriousness. Like Sidney Smith, he never allowed his wit to meddle with solemn subjects. The needy were never sent empty from his house:

• “Low is my porch, as is my fate,
• But void of state;
• And yet the threshold of my door
• So worn by th’ poor
• Who thither come, and freely get
• Good words or meat.”

A few acres of glebe afforded him a pleasant source of amusement, and in his rambles round his fields, and by the banks of Dean Bourn, he acquired that intimate acquaintance with the beauties of nature which his taste led him to cultivate, and his genius to enshrine in verse. So strong was his love for nature that he constituted himself the hierophant of her mysteries, and his enjoyment of rural scenery, though tinged at times with a feeling of sadness, may have compensated in some measure for the loss of that gay company which at first he regretted so much. The introduction to his poems commences:

• “I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;
• Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
• I write of groves and twilights,” &c.

Nature and all her phenomena were endeared to him by a thousand pleasant associations. The flowers were his companions, and he addresses them with playful familiarity. Read his lines “To Primroses filled with Morning Dew:”

• “Why do ye weep, sweet babes? can tears
• Speak grief in you,
• Who were but born
• Just as the modest morn
• Teem’d her refreshing dew?
• Alas, you have not known that shower
• That mars a flower;
• Nor felt the unkind
• Breath of a blasting wind;
• 10Nor are ye worn with years,
• Nor warpt as we,
• Who think it strange to see
• Such pretty flowers, like to orphans young,
• To speak by tears, before ye have a tongue.

And those “To Violets,” beginning:

• “Welcome, maids of honour,
• You do bring
• In the spring,
• And wait upon her.”

It was undoubtedly from his own pleasurable experience that he wrote to his brother Thomas on the delights of a country life:

• “The damaskt meadows, and the pebbly streams
• Sweeten, and make soft your dreams;
• The purling springs, groves, birds, and well-weaved bowers,
• With fields enamelled with flowers,
• Present their shapes.”

And “To the Honoured M. Endymion Porter:”

• “This done, then to the enamell’d meads
• Thou go’st, and as thy foot there treads,
• Thou see’st a present god-like power
• Imprinted in each herb and flower,
• And smell’st the breath of great-eyed kine,
• Sweet as the blossoms of the vine.”

The flowery tribes supplied him with numberless subjects for his fancy to luxuriate upon, and run into the most extravagant wildness. Is Sappho unwell?

• “ Lilies will languish, violets look ill,
• Sickly the primrose, pale the daffodil.
• Pansies will weep.”

Does Julia recover? the flowers are invited to participate in his joy.

• “Droop, droop no more, or hang the head,
• Ye roses almost withered.
• New strength and newer purple get,
• Each here declining violet.”

Electra is conjured to love him:

• “By all those sweets that be
• I’ the flowery nunnery.”

The flowers were his friends, and with them he shared his joys and sorrows.

Of all the seasons, spring and early summer appear to have been his favourites, as they were with all the old poets. The old-fashioned ceremonies which ushered in the reviving year were rich in poetical associations, and speak volumes for the vivid imaginations of our forefathers. There is no doubt that much of poetry has vanished in England with the decay of these simple, yet picturesque, rites. Merry England is a thing of the past, an antiquarian curiosity, which poets affect to believe in, and which historians annihilate with statistics. We may be wiser than our forefathers in some respects; but, without at all joining in the cry that the former times were better than these, we may without inconsistency experience a feeling of regret that so many of their pleasant institutions have fallen into decay, leaving their place still unfilled. But revenons à nos moutons, we were on the subject of spring, and “the succession of the four sweet months,” each fraught with beauties to the poet’s eye.

• “First April, she with mellow showers
• Opens the way for early flowers;
• Then after her comes smiling May,
• In a more rich and sweet array;
• Next enters June, and brings us more
• Gems than those two that went before;
• Then, lastly, July comes, and she
• More wealth brings in than all those three.”

With what a burst of vaulting enthusiasm must the following welcome to spring have been penned:

• “Now is the time for mirth,
• Nor cheek nor tongue be dumb;
• For with the flowery earth,
• The golden pomp is come,” &c.

And now May-day has dawned, and the rites have commenced, but Corinna has not yet risen. She is roused from her slumbers by the accompanying serenade:

• “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.”

Most of the customs by which May-day was formerly distinguished were purely English in their origin, but the gathering May-dew was a practice known in Spain, as we learn from Howell, who, in his “Familiar Letters” tells the following anecdote of Charles I., as Prince of Wales, while on his



visit to Spain. “Not long since, the Prince, understanding that the Infanta was used to go some mornings to the Casa de Campo, a summer-house the king hath t’other side the river, to gather May-dew, he did rise betimes, and went thither, taking your brother with him. They were let into the house and into the garden, but the Infanta was in the orchard, and there being a high partition wall between them, and the door doubly bolted, the Prince got on the top of the wall, and sprang down a great height, and so made towards her; but she, spying him first of all the rest, gave a shriek and ran back. The old marquis that was then her guardian, came towards the Prince, and fell on his knees, conjuring his Highness to retire, in regard he hazarded his head if he admitted any to her company; so the door was opened, and he came out under that wall over which he had gone in.” It is to this inaugurating ceremony that Herrick alludes when urging Corinna to rise, he sings,

• “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.”

The dew thus gathered before sunrise on May morning was used as a cosmetic, as Pepys tells us in his diary, under the date 1667, April 28th, “My wife away with Jane and Mr. Hewer, to Woolwich, in order to a little air, and to lie there to-night, and so to gather May-dew to-morrow morning, which Mrs. Turner has taught her is the only thing in the world to wash her face with, and I am contented with it.”

The installation of the May-Queen in her temporary dignity has formed the theme of verse for more than one poet. One of these fair sovereigns of the springtime, Mistress Bridget Lowman, is addressed by her laureate, Herrick, in a “Meadow Verse, or Anniversary,” recited at her coronation, and commencing

• “Come with the spring-time forth, fair maid, and be
• This year again the meadows’ deity.”

And now listen to the chant which accompanies the erection of the Maypole, decked bravely with ribbons and chaplets of flowers:

• “The Maypole is up,
• Now give me the cup,
• I’ll drink to the garlands around it;
• But first unto those
• Whose hands did compose
• The glory of flowers that crown’d it.”

But while May and spring-time are especially the seasons which the poet delights to honour, he has not forgotten the thoroughly English institutions of Yule-tide and its appropriate festivities. Many of the customs which he commemorates have either vanished entirely, or exist only in a mutilated form, in remote parts of the country, shorn of their poetical associations. In consequence of this, many of the allusions to these ceremonies are almost unintelligible, and an illustrated edition of the Hesperides would require the labours of a well-read antiquary. Washington Irving, than whom no writer enters more entirely into the spirit of these relics of a past age, has pointed out the writings of Herrick as a rich storehouse of antiquated customs, and testified his admiration of them by repeated quotations.

The ceremony of lighting the Yule-log with the remains of the last year’s block is joyously celebrated by the madrigal commencing

• “Come bring with a noise,
• My merry, merry boys,
• The Christmas log to the firing:
• While my good dame, she
• Bids you all be free,
• And drink to your heart’s desiring.”

Another practice which was customary on Christmas Eve, and is not yet quite extinct, though it exists in a somewhat different form, has inspired the poet’s verse:

• “Wassail the trees, that they may bear
• You many a plum, and many a pear;



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• For more or less fruits they will bring,
• As you do give them wassailing.”

The antiquary’s art would be well exercised upon the New Year’s Gift which Herrick wrote from London to his friend Sir Simeon Steward, in the country:

• “A jolly
• Verse crowned with ivy and with holly,
• That tells of winter’s tales and mirth,
• That milkmaids make about the hearth,
• Of Christmas sports,” &c.

But Christmas and its jollities, like all other pleasant things, have an end, and at their termination on Candlemas Eve, he sings:

• “Down with the rosemary and bays,
• Down with the mistletoe;
• Instead of holly now upraise
• The greener box for show.”

And so one might go on quoting for ever verses appropriate to each season, the fruits of the poet’s happier moods. But he was not always thus happily inclined. His heart was not in the country, and its retirement at times weighed heavily upon his spirits, and checked his mirth. In such moments of despondency, he would ejaculate:

• “O earth, earth, earth, hear thou my voice, and be
• Loving and gentle for to cover me:
• Banish’d from thee I live, ne’er to return,
• Unless thou giv’st my small remains an urn.”

Or he would vent his spleen in useless regrets.

• “Before I went
• To banishment,
• Into the loathed West;
• I could rehearse
• A lyric verse,
• And speak it with the best.”

As a staunch royalist, and one too who was under personal obligations to the king, Herrick took a deep interest in the stirring events which were agitating the country, and the rumours of which penetrated even the seclusion of Dean Prior. His sympathy found expression in verse, and the incidents of the protracted struggle between Charles the First and his parliament are its subjects. The titles of a few of these effusions must suffice: “To the King, upon the taking of Leicester;” “To the King, upon his coming with his army into the West;” “To Prince Charles, upon his coming to Exeter:” “To Sir John Berkley, governor of Exeter;” “To the Lord Hopton, on his fight in Cornwall.” If we are to interpret literally his “Vow to Mars,” it would seem to indicate that he joined the king’s army, but in the absence of any other evidence it would be unsafe to draw such a conclusion.

To go back a little in point of time, Herrick had not been long settled in his living, when on May 29, 1629, Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II., was born at St. James’s Palace. The same day the king went to St. Paul’s to return thanks for the birth of his heir. As the procession was slowly winding along the Strand, the crowds of admiring spectators were astonished by the appearance of a bright star at noonday. The omen was hailed as auspicious, and many were the bad verses which it provoked. Herrick contributes his quota, not by any means the worst, in “a pastoral upon the birth of Prince Charles,” which was set to music and dedicated to the king.

• “At noon of day was seen a silver star,
• Bright as the wise men’s torch, which guided them
• To God’s sweet babe, when born at Bethlethem.
• While golden angels, some have told to me,
• Sung out his birth with heavenly minstrelsy.”

Wotton alludes to the same circumstance, and it has been commemorated upon some of the coinage of the reign of Charles II.

Then, as another offering of gratitude to the king, we have “The poet’s good wishes for the most hopeful and handsome Prince, the Duke of York,” which the subject of them unhappily did not realize.

• “May the thrice three sisters sing
• Him the sovereign of their spring;



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• And entitle none to be
• Prince of Helicon but he.

• May his soft foot where it treads,
• Gardens thence produce and meads;
• And those meadows full be set
• With the rose aud violet.”

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to remark, after the examples which have been quoted, that Herrick’s versification is far more easy and perfect than that of many of his contemporaries. That he was an ardent lover of music may be gathered from frequent allusions in his poems, and that his ear was very correct is evident from the rhythmical flow of his verse. His heroics are sonorous without roughness and harmonious without monotony, but the metre in which he seems most to delight is a kind of trochaic, in which his well known advice “to the Virgins, to make much of time,” is written.

• “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.

Somewhat different is “The night-piece, to Julia.”

• “Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee,
• The shooting stars attend thee,
• And the elves also,
• Whose little eyes glow
• Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee.

• No Will-o’-the-wisp mislight thee,
• Nor snake nor slow-worm bite thee;
• But on, on thy way,
• Not making a stay,
• 10Since ghost there’s none to affright thee.

• Let not the dark thee cumber,
• What though the moon does slumber?
• The stars of the night
• Will lend thee their light
• Like tapers clear without number.”

How musically the verses trip along!

From the fact that some of the Noble Numbers are still, or were till very recently remembered by the people of Devon, we may infer that most of them were composed during Herrick’s residence among them. Southey, or the writer of the article on Herrick in the Quarterly Review for Aug. 1810, while on a pilgrimage to Dean Prior, met with an old woman in the 99th year of her age, named Dorothy King. Her mother had lived in the family of Herrick’s successor, and from her she had learned five of the Noble Numbers which she was in the habit of repeating. Among them was the beautiful “Litany to the Holy Spirit,” and which will need no apology for being quoted, at least in part.

• “In the hour of my distress,
• When temptations me oppress,
• And when I my sins confess,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

• When I lie within my bed
• Sick in heart, and sick in head.
• And with doubts discomforted,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

• When the house doth sigh and weep,
• 10And the world is drown’d in sleep,
• Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

---

• When, God knows, I’m toss’d about,
• Either with despair or doubt,
• Yet before the glass be out,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

• When the Tempter me pursu’th,
• With the sins of all my youth,
• And half damns me with untruth,
• 20Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

• When the flames and hellish cries
• Fright mine ears, and fright mine eyes,
• And all terrors me surprise,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

• When the Judgment is reveal’d,
• And that open’d which was seal’d,
• When to Thee I have appeal’d,
• Sweet Spirit, comfort me!”

We have said that, in some respects, Herrick’s sacred poetry bears resemblance to the delightful strains of the sweet singer of the Temple. But, with some points of likeness, the two poets have scarcely more in common than might be inferred from their physical characteristics. Herbert, all intellect, delicate and sensitive as a woman, his attenuated frame almost worn out by his ever active mind, was in every way a contrast to the rough and somewhat coarse, though amiable and kind hearted, Herrick, in whose character the animal, though it did not perhaps predominate over the intellectual, was still a prominent feature.



Nor were their habits of life less diverse than their persons. Herbert, abstemious as an anchorite, weakened his already shattered constitution by his frequent fastings, while Herrick, though compelled from prudential motives to restrain his bacchanalian propensities, was still an ardent worshipper of the goddess Sack, whom he thus apostrophizes:

• “Thou mak’st me nimble as the winged hours,
• To dance and caper on the heads of flowers,
• And ride the sunbeams.”

Herbert abounds in the conceits which were essential to popular poetry in his time, and his subtle and refined intellect revels in the fanciful analogies and nice distinctions which characterize the school of Donne and his imitators. Herrick, with a mind less acute, but vigorous and comprehensive, has so far fallen in with the prevailing fashion as to disfigure his muse with these meretricious ornaments, but he is evidently ill at ease in them, and his effusions under this restraint are far less happy than those written under the inspiring influence of natural scenes. Herbert had more fancy, Herrick the more vivid imagination. But on the hallowed ground of devotion they had in common an ardent spirit of piety, a firm faith in God, and souls overflowing with love to his creatures. Herrick’s poetry bears more marks of mental conflict, and the Slough of Despond was a scene not unfamiliar to him. It was perhaps as his mind was recovering its tranquillity after one of these struggles that he wrote “The White Island, or Place of the Blest!”

• “ In this world, the Isle of Dreams,
• While we sit by sorrows’ streams,
• Tears and terrors are our themes
• Reciting.

• But when once from hence we fly,
• More and more approaching nigh
• Unto young Eternity,
• Uniting.

• In that whiter Island, where
• 10Things are evermore sincere,
• Candour here and lustre there
• Delighting:

• There no monstrous fancies shall
• Out of hell an horror call,
• To create, or cause at all,
• Affrighting.

• There in calm and cooling sleep
• We our eyes shall never steep,
• But eternal watch shall keep,
• 20Attending

• Pleasures, such as shall pursue
• Me immortalized and you,
• And fresh joys, as never too
• Have ending.”

One peep at Fairy land and we have done. It is a high feast day, and his elvish majesty is seated with his guests in the hall of his palace, attended by

• “The merry cricket, puling fly,
• The piping gnat for minstrelsy.
• And now, we must imagine first,
• The elves present to quench his thirst,
• A pure seed pearl of infant dew,
• Brought and besweeten’d in a blue
• And fragrant violet.”

Pâte de foiegras was a delicacy unknown in the fairy court, but instead we have

• “The broke heart of a nightingale
• O’ercome in music.”

After the feast we are introduced to the bower of Queen Mab:

• “A grove
• Sometimes devoted unto love,
• Tinsell’d with twilight.”

It is illuminated by

• “The glow-worm’s eyes, the shining scales
• Of silvery fish,
• Upon six plump dandelions high
• Rear’d, lies her elvish majesty.

• And overhead
• A spinner’s circle is bespread
• With cobweb curtains; from the roof
• So neatly sunk, as that no proof
• Or any tackling can declare
• 10What gives it hanging in the air.”

The few remaining facts of Herrick’s life may be summed up in a very brief space. In 1648 he was ejected from his living by the parliamentarians, and this summary proceeding was hailed by him as the means of deliverance from his solitude. He returned to London with delight.

• “Ravisht in spirit I come, nay more, I fly
• To thee, blest place of my nativity,”

was his exclamation. Here again his mode of life becomes matter of conjecture. He resided for a time in Westminster, and supported himself by his writings. Whether he followed the fortunes of the Royal Family to the Continent, we have no means of ascertaining. In some of his poems we have hints of a sea voyage, for instance:

• “Mighty Neptune, may it please
• Thee, the Rector of the seas,
• That my barque may safely run
• Through thy watery region.”

But this may be merely a fanciful imitation of a classical passage.

At the restoration he returned to his vicarage, where he continued till his death, which took place about the year 1676.

It is to be regretted that many of his pieces, most distinguished by richness of fancy and lighthearted gaiety, have too great warmth of colouring to admit of being quoted in their integrity. In common with his contemporaries he allowed himself to pander to the corrupt taste of the age. The moral turpitude of a depraved court explains, while it does not palliate, the disgusting obscenities with which the writings of this period are polluted. That the example thus shamelessly held up to imitation should find a numerous crowd of followers is nothing more than might be expected from the naturally downward tendency of our nature. But that the writers personally, while assisting in the spread of this universal pollution, should have remained comparatively uncontaminated, is a phenomenon which, while in itself inexplicable, serves only to exaggerate their culpability. That they allowed themselves thus to be borne along by the tide of popular tendencies, without raising their voice in the cause of virtue and decorum, is a fact as lamentable as it is undoubted. It could not be expected that, like the stern prophets of the Old Testament history, they should have stood up in the midst of the people as the champions of religion and morality, and denounced the judgments of heaven upon the depravity of the age; but, while occupying a more neutral position, it was not too much to expect that they should have painted virtue and vice in their true colours, instead of surrounding the latter with a halo of attractiveness, glittering as the phosphoric exhalations of putrescence, and associating the former with everything that is imbecile and absurd.

Like these men, Herrick sinned;



sinned not only against virtue and decency, but against his own better heart. So long as he speaks from the fulness of his love for nature, and intense sympathy with all that is beautiful in the material creation, his poetry is exquisitely musical and refined; but no sooner does he assume the character of a gay cavalier than the fire of genius seems quenched by the torrent of coarseness and sensuality which disfigures so much of his writings.

I read once in lazy humour Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” on a cold May night when the north wind was blowing; in lazy humour, but when I came to the tale that is here amplified there was something in it that fixed my attention and made me think of it; and whether I would or no, my thoughts ran in this way, as here follows.

So I felt obliged to write, and wrote accordingly, and by the time I had done the grey light filled all my room; so I put out my candles, and went to bed, not without fear and trembling, for the morning twilight is so strange and lonely. This is what I wrote.

Yes, on that dark night, with that wild unsteady north wind howling, though it was Maytime, it was doubtless dismal enough in the forest, where the boughs clashed eerily, and where, as the wanderer in that place hurried along, strange forms half showed themselves to him, the more fearful because half seen in that way: dismal enough doubtless on wide moors where the great wind had it all its own way: dismal on the rivers creeping on and



on between the marsh-lands, creeping through the willows, the water trickling through the locks, sounding faintly in the gusts of the wind.

Yet surely nowhere so dismal as by the side of that still pool.

I threw myself down on the ground there, utterly exhausted with my struggle against the wind, and with bearing the fathoms and fathoms of the heavily-leaded plumb-line that lay beside me.

Fierce as the wind was, it could not raise the leaden waters of that fearful pool, defended as they were by the steep banks of dripping yellow clay, striped horribly here and there with ghastly uncertain green and blue.

They said no man could fathom it; and yet all round the edges of it grew a rank crop of dreary reeds and segs, some round, some flat, but none ever flowering as other things flowered, never dying and being renewed, but always the same stiff array of unbroken reeds and segs, some round, some flat. Hard by me were two trees leafless and ugly, made, it seemed, only for the wind to go through with a wild sough on such nights as these; and for a mile from that place were no other trees.

True, I could not see all this at that time, then, in the dark night, but I knew well that it was all there; for much had I studied this pool in the day-time, trying to learn the secret of it; many hours I had spent there, happy with a kind of happiness, because forgetful of the past. And even now, could I not hear the wind going through those trees, as it never went through any trees before or since? could I not see gleams of the dismal moor? could I not hear those reeds just taken by the wind, knocking against each other, the flat ones scraping all along the round ones? Could I not hear, moreover, the slow trickling of the land-springs through the clay banks?

The cold, chill horror of the place was too much for me; I had never been there by night before, nobody had for quite a long time, and now to come on such a night! If there had been any moon, the place would have looked more as it did by day; besides, the moon shining on water is always so beautiful, on any water even: if it had been starlight, one could have looked at the stars and thought of the time when those fields were fertile and beautiful (for such a time was, I am sure), when the cowslips grew among the grass, and when there was promise of yellow-waving corn stained with poppies; that time which the stars had seen, but which we had never seen, which even they would never see again—past time!

Ah! what was that which touched my shoulder?—Yes, I see, only a dead leaf.—Yes, to be here on this eighth of May too of all nights in the year, the night of that awful day when ten years ago I slew him, not undeservedly, God knows, yet how dreadful it was!—Another leaf! and another!—Strange, those trees have been dead this hundred years, I should think. How sharp the wind is too, just as if I were moving along and meeting it;—why, I am moving! what then, I am not there after all; where am I then?



there are the trees; no, they are freshly-planted oak saplings, the very ones that those withered last-year’s leaves were blown on me from.

I have been dreaming then, and am on my road to the lake: but what a young wood! I must have lost my way; I never saw all this before, Well—I will walk on stoutly.

May the Lord help my senses! I am riding!—on a mule; a bell tinkles somewhere on him; the wind blows something about with a flapping sound: something? in Heaven’s name, what? My long black robes.—Why—when I left my house I was clad in serviceable broadcloth of the nineteenth century.

I shall go mad—I am mad—I am gone to the Devil—I have lost my identity; who knows in what place, in what age of the world I am living now? Yet I will be calm; I have seen all these things before, in pictures surely, or something like them. I am resigned, since it is no worse than that. I am a priest then, in the dim, far-off thirteenth century, riding, about midnight I should say, to carry the blessed sacrament to some dying man.

Soon I found that I was not alone; a man was riding close to me on a horse; he was fantastically dressed, more so than usual for that time, being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green, with quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes counterchanged on the stripes; all this I saw by the lantern he carried, in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed. On he went, unsteadily rolling, very drunk, though it was the thirteenth century, but being plainly used to that, he sat his horse fairly well.

I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character, with insatiable curiosity and intense amusement; but as a quiet priest of a long-past age, with contempt and disgust enough, not unmixed with fear and anxiety.

He roared out snatches of doggrel verse as he went along, drinking songs, hunting songs, robbing songs, lust-songs, in a voice that sounded far and far above the roaring of the wind, though that was high, and rolled along the dark road that his lantern cast spikes of light along ever so far, making the devils grin: and meanwhile I, the priest, glanced from him wrathfully every now and then to That which I carried very reverently in my hand, and my blood curdled with shame and indignation; but being a shrewd priest, I knew well enough that a sermon would be utterly thrown away on a man who was drunk every day in the year, and, more especially, very drunk then. So I held my peace, saying only under my breath:

“Dixit insipiens in corde suo, Non est Deus. Corrupti sunt et abominabiles facti sunt in studiis suis; non est qui faciat bonum, non est usque ad unum: sepulchrum patens est guttur eorum; linguis suis dolose agebant, venenum aspidum sub labiis eorum. Dominum non invocaverunt; illic trepidaverunt timore, ubi non erat timor. Quis dabit ex Sion salutare Israel?”

and so I went on, thinking too at times about the man who was dying and whom I was soon to see: he had been a bold bad plundering baron, but was said lately to have altered his way of life, having seen a miracle or some such thing; he had departed to keep a tournament near his castle lately, but had been brought back sore wounded, so this drunken servant, with some difficulty and much unseasonable merriment, had made me understand, and now lay at the point of death, brought about by unskilful tending and such like. Then I thought of his face—a bad face, very bad, retreating forehead, small twinkling eyes, projecting lower jaw; and such a voice, too, he had! like the grunt of a boar mostly.

Now don’t you think it strange that this face should be the same, actually the same as the face of my enemy, slain that very day ten years ago? I



did not hate him, either that man or the baron, but I wanted to see as little of him as possible, and I hoped that the ceremony would soon be over, and that I should be at liberty again.

And so with these thoughts and many others, but all thought strangely double, we went along, the varlet being too drunk to take much notice of me, only once, as he was singing some doggrel, like this, I think, making allowances for change of language and so forth:

• “The Duke went to Treves
• On the first of November;
• His wife stay’d at Bonn—
• Let me see, I remember;

• “When the Duke came back
• To look for his wife,
• We came from Cologne,
• And took the Duke’s life;

• “We hung him mid high
• 10Between spire and pavement,
• From their mouths dropp’d the cabbage
• Of the carles in amazement.”

“Boo—hoo! Church-rat! Church mouse! Hilloa, Priest! have you brought the pyx, eh?”

From some cause or other he seemed to think this an excellent joke, for he almost shrieked with laughter as we went along; but by this time we had reached the castle. Challenge, and counter-challenge, and we passed the outermost gate and began to go through some of the courts, in which stood lime trees here and there, growing green tenderly with that Maytime, though the north wind bit so keenly.

How strange again! as I went farther, there seemed no doubt of it; here in the aftertime came that pool, how I knew not; but in the few moments that we were riding from the outer gate to the castle-porch I thought so intensely over the probable cause for the existence of that pool, that (how strange!) I could almost have thought I was back again listening to the oozing of the land-springs through the high clay banks there. I was wakened from that, before it grew too strong, by the glare of many torches, and, dismounting, found myself in the midst of some twenty attendants, with flushed faces and wildly sparkling eyes, which they were vainly trying to soften to due solemnity; mock solemnity I had almost said, for they did not seem to think it necessary to appear really solemn, and had difficulty enough apparently in not prolonging indefinitely the shout of laughter with which they had at first greeted me. “Take the holy Father to my Lord,” said one at last, “and we will go with him.”

So they led me up the stairs into the gorgeously-furnished chamber; the light from the heavy waxen candles was pleasant to my eyes after the glare and twisted red smoke of the pine-torches; but all the essences scattered about the chamber were not enough to conquer the fiery breath of those about me.

I put on the alb and stole they brought me, and, before I went up to the sick man, looked round on those that were in the rooms; for the rooms opened one into the other by many doors, across some of which hung gorgeous tapestry; all the rooms seemed to have many people, for some stood at these doors, and some passed to and fro, swinging aside the heavy hangings; once several people at once, seemingly quite by accident, drew aside almost all the veils from the doors, and showed an endless perspective of gorgeousness.

And at these things my heart fainted for horror. “Had not the Jews of late,” thought I, the priest, “been very much in the habit of crucifying children in mockery of the Holiest, holding gorgeous feasts while they beheld the poor innocents die? these men are Atheists, you are in a trap, yet quit yourself like a man.”

“Ah, sharp one,” thought I, the author, “where are you at last? try to pray as a test.—Well, well, these things are strangely like devils.—O man, you have talked about bravery often, now is your time to practice



it: once for all trust in God, or I fear you are lost.”

Moreover it increased my horror that there was no appearance of a woman in all these rooms; and yet was there not? there, those things—I looked more intently; yes, no doubt they were women, but all dressed like men;—what a ghastly place!

“O man! do your duty,” my angel said; then in spite of the bloodshot eyes of man and woman there, in spite of their bold looks, they quailed before me.

I stepped up to the bedside, where under the velvet coverlid lay the dying man, his small sparkling eyes only (but dulled now by coming death) showing above the swathings. I was about to kneel down by the bedside to confess him, when one of those—things—called out (now they had just been whispering and sniggering together, but the priest in his righteous, brave scorn would not look at them; the humbled author, half fearful, half trustful, dared not): so one called out:

“Sir Priest, for three days our master has spoken no articulate word; you must pass over all particulars; ask for a sign only.”

Such a strange ghastly suspicion flashed across me just then; but I choked it, and asked the dying man if he repented of his sins, and if he believed all that was necessary to salvation, and, if so, to make a sign, if he were able: the man moved a little and groaned; so I took it for a sign, as he was clearly incapable either of speaking or moving, and accordingly began the service for the administration of the sacraments; and as I began, those behind me and through all the rooms (I know it was through all of them) began to move about, in a bewildering dance-like motion, mazy and intricate; yes, and presently music struck up through all those rooms, music and singing, lively and gay; many of the tunes I had heard before (in the nineteenth century); I could have sworn to half a dozen of the polkas.

The rooms grew fuller and fuller of people; they passed thick and fast between the rooms, and the hangings were continually rustling; one fat old man with a big belly crept under the bed where I was, and wheezed and chuckled there, laughing and talking to one who stooped down and lifted up the hangings to look at him.

Still more and more people talking and singing and laughing and twirling about, till my brain went round and round, and I scarce knew what I did; yet, somehow, I could not leave off; I dared not even look over my shoulder, fearing lest I should see something so horrible as to make me die.

So I got on with the service, and at last took the Pyx, and took thereout the sacred wafer, whereupon was a deep silence through all those rooms, which troubled me, I think, more than all which had gone before, for I knew well it did not mean reverence.

I held it up, that which I counted so holy, when lo! great laughter, echoing like thunder-claps through all the rooms, not dulled by the veiling hangings, for they were all raised up together, and, with a slow upheaval of the rich clothes among which he lay, with a sound that was half snarl, half grunt, with helpless body swathed in bedclothes, a huge swine that I had been shriving tore from me the Holy Thing, deeply scoring my hand as he did so with tusk and tooth, so that the red blood ran quick on to the floor.

Therewithal he rolled down on to the floor, and lay there helplessly, only able to roll to and fro, because of the swathings.

Then right madly skirled the intolerable laughter, rising to shrieks that were fearfuller than any scream of agony I ever heard; the hundreds of people through all those grand rooms danced and wheeled about me, shrieking, hemming me in with interlaced arms, the women loosing their long hair and thrusting forward their horribly



-grinning unsexed faces toward me till I felt their hot breath.

Oh! how I hated them all! almost hated all mankind for their sakes; how I longed to get right quit of all men; among whom, as it seemed, all sacredest things even were made a mock of. I looked about me fiercely, I sprang forward, and clutched a sword from the gilded belt of one of those who stood near me; with savage blows that threw the blood about the gilded walls and their hangings right over the heads of those—things—I cleared myself from them, and tore down the great stairs madly, yet could not, as in a dream, go fast enough, because of my passion.

I was out in the courtyard, among the lime trees soon, the north wind blowing freshly on my heated forehead in that dawn. The outer gate was locked and bolted; I stooped and raised a great stone and sent it at the lock with all my strength, and I was stronger than ten men then; iron and oak gave way before it, and through the ragged splinters I tore in reckless fury, like a wild horse through a hazel hedge.

And no one had pursued me. I knelt down on the dear green turf outside, and thanked God with streaming eyes for my deliverance, praying Him forgiveness for my unwilling share in that night’s mockery.

Then, I arose and turned to go, but even as I did so I heard a roar as if the world were coming in two, and looking toward the castle, saw, not a castle, but a great cloud of white lime-dust swaying this way and that in the gusts of the wind.

Then while the east grew bright there arose a hissing, gurgling noise, that swelled into the roar and wash of many waters, and by then the sun had risen a deep black lake lay before my feet.

And this is how I tried to fathom the Lindenborg Pool.