about them foreign to Middlesex or Devon. Herrick's imagination
has no far horizons: like Burns and Crabbe fifty years since, or
Barnes (that exquisite and neglected pastoralist of fair Dorset,
perfect within his narrower range as Herrick) to-day, it is his
own native land only which he sees and paints: even the fairy
world in which, at whatever inevitable interval, he is second to
Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an
elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel
and their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and
reflecting human life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick
cannot walk: and it may have been due to his good sense and true
feeling for art, that here, where resemblance might have seemed
probable, he borrows nothing from MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or
TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range of Byron's or
Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this sweet
insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with it
a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he
has not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who
derive from literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has
the fresh breeze and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the
grace and greenery of English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he
too shares the strength and inspiration which come from touch of
a man's native soil.

What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism
in form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations
to his predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively
inquire what place may be assigned to him in our literature at