Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.

Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in
the models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic
tone which with singular felicity he has often taken. These are
common to many writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn
more from the great ancient world ever rank among poets of high
order, or enter the innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power
to describe men and things as the poet sees them with simple
sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint scenes and imaginations
as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the gift to clothe
each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical form,
giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation, and
rounding off without effort;-- the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering
on our minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of
classicalism, and the reason why (until modern effort equals
them) the study of that Hellenic and Latin poetry in which these
gifts are eminent above all other literatures yet created, must
be essential. And it is success in precisely these excellences
which is here claimed for Herrick. He is classical in the great
and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more so, probably,
than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far from
dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not
of 1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and
loves: his Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and
Julia wear no 'buckles of the purest gold,' nor have anything