Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

are known to most readers, as well as the line,

  Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.

The quaintly named pieces, the Elixir, the Collar, and the Pulley, are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling.  But Herbert’s poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste.  Take this passage from Whitsunday,

Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,

which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul

            ...grew so fast within
  It broke the outward shell of sin,
  And so was hatched a cherubin.

Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, “the Silurist,” or Welshman, whose fine piece, the Retreat, has been often compared with Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.  Frances Quarles’s Divine Emblems long remained a favorite book with religious readers both in old and New England.  Emblem books, in which engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century.  The most famous of them all were Jacob Catt’s Dutch emblems.

One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose Hesperides, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A.  Abbey.  Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire.  The most quoted of his religious poems is, How to Keep a True Lent. But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry certainly was not.  He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon companion at

                  ...those lyric feasts
  Made at the Sun,
  The Dog, the Triple Tun;
  Where we such clusters had
  As made us nobly wild, not mad. 
  And yet each verse of thine,
  Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.

Herrick’s Noble Numbers seldom rises above the expression of a cheerful gratitude and contentment.  He had not the subtlety and elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody, sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse.  The conceits of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an occasional pretty quaintness.  He is the poet of English parish festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil.  He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to “Julia,” and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings.  He has been called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of Carpe diem and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known poems, such as Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, and To Corinna, To Go a Maying.