The name of Herbert, which we have met with in the cathedral, and which belongs to the Earls of Pembroke, presents itself to us once more in a very different and very beautiful aspect.  Between Salisbury and Wilton, three miles and a half distant, is the little village of Bemerton, where “holy George Herbert” lived and died, and where he lies buried.  Many Americans who know little else of him recall the lines borrowed from him by Irving in the “Sketch-Book” and by Emerson in “Nature.”  The “Sketch-Book” gives the lines thus:—­

  “Sweet day, so pure, so calm, so bright,
    The bridal of the earth and sky.”

In other versions the fourth word is cool instead of pure, and cool is, I believe, the correct reading.  The day when we visited Bemerton was, according to A——­’s diary, “perfect.”  I was struck with the calm beauty of the scene around us, the fresh greenness of all growing things, and the stillness of the river which mirrored the heavens above it.  It must have been this reflection which the poet was thinking of when he spoke of the bridal of the earth and sky.  The river is the Wiltshire Avon; not Shakespeare’s Avon, but the southern stream of the same name, which empties into the British Channel.

So much of George Herbert’s intellectual and moral character repeat themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher.  Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare.  I found a portrait in the National Gallery which was a good specimen of it; the bust of a near friend of his, more intimate with him than almost any other person, is often taken for that of Emerson.  I see something of it in the portrait of Sir Philip Sidney, and I doubt not that traces of a similar mental resemblance ran through the whole group, with individual characteristics which were in some respects quite different.  I will take a single verse of Herbert’s from Emerson’s “Nature,”—­one of the five which he quotes:—­

       “Nothing hath got so far
  But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
       His eyes dismount the highest star: 
       He is in little all the sphere. 
  Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they
       Find their acquaintance there.”

Emerson himself fully recognizes his obligations to “the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century,” as he calls George Herbert.  There are many passages in his writings which sound as if they were paraphrases from the elder poet.  From him it is that Emerson gets a word he is fond of, and of which his imitators are too fond:—­

  “Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
  Makes that and the action fine.”

The little chapel in which Herbert officiated is perhaps half as long again as the room in which I am writing, but it is four or five feet narrower,—­and I do not live in a palace.  Here this humble servant of God preached and prayed, and here by his faithful and loving service he so endeared himself to all around him that he has been canonized by an epithet no other saint of the English Church has had bestowed upon him.  His life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to borrow one of his own lines,