In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything is
marvelously adapted to their requirement; nothing is out of proportion
or out of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious people in
their winsome way, "part pagan, part papistical;" they have their
pardons and indulgences, their psalters and chapels, and
An apple's-core is hung up dried,
With rattling kernels, which is rung
To call to Morn and Even-song;
and very conveniently,
Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut,
The Holy-water there is put.
It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the
impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648
seems never very far away.
It is only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the
Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and
liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes,
there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen
from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline.
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