I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with
perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the
prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one place
Herrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what
would have been Pepys's manner had Pepys written verse), and in another
place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of this
latter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's _concetti_:
One of the five straight branches of my hand
Is lopt already, and the rest but stand
Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.
With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little of
himself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understood
and loved music. None but a lover could have said:
The mellow touch of musick most doth wound
The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise,
But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
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