It is the Ode on a Grecian
Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion that
have given Keats his spacious niche in the gallery of England's poets.
Shelley's two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belong
respectively to Greece and Italy. Browning's The Ring and the Book is
Italian; Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the Idylls of the
King, and Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in
dignity to none produced in the nineteenth century--is a Persian story.
But Herrick's "golden apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, and
reddened in the mist and sunshine of his native island.
Even the fairy poems, which must be classed by themselves, are not
wanting in local flavor. Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable
distance from that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Puck and Titania
are of finer breath than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to have
Devonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Like
the magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color and
perfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts--from the
cups of morning-glories.
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