The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he may
read Herrick's poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness
might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. "For
unconscious impiety," remarks Mr. Edmund Gosse, (1) "this rivals the
famous passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted God to 'pause and
think.'" Elsewhere, in an apostrophe to "Heaven," Herrick says:
Let mercy be
So kind to set me free,
And I will straight
Come in, or force the gate.
In any event, the poet did not purpose to be left out!
(1) In _Seventeenth-Century Studies_. and the general
absence of arrangement in the "Hesperides," Dr. Grosart
advances the theory that the printers exercised arbitrary
authority on these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick
kept the epigrams and personal tributes in manuscript books
separate from the rest of the work, which would have made a
too slender volume by itself, and on the plea of this
slender-ness was induced to trust the two collections to the
publisher, "whereupon he or some un-skilled subordinate
proceeded to intermix these additions with the others.
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