When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!

How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--

--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the
deepest of Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or
circumstance or scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and
NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it
is, own that purple chord, that more inwoven harmony, possessed
by poets of greater depth and splendour,--by Shakespeare and
Milton often, by Spenser more rarely. But if we put aside these
'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the Editor's judgment
Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both over Nature
and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as lyrical
poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all who
flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred
years since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality,
we have, indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-
singers who did not confine themselves to the Lyric, but from
many poets--some the unknown contributors to our early
anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller, Collins, and others,
with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep which lyrical
poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work, not at
the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,