His principal work is _The Temple, or, Sacred
Poems and Private Ejaculations_. The short lyrics which form the stones of
this temple are upon the rites and ceremonies of the Church and other
sacred subjects: many of them are still in great favor, and will always
be. In his portraiture of the _Good Parson_, he paints himself. He
magnifies the office, and he fulfilled all the requirements he has laid
down.
Robert Herrick, 1591-1674: like Herbert, Herrick was a clergyman, but,
unlike Herbert, he was not a holy man. He wrote Anacreontic poems, full of
wine and love, and appears to us like a reveller masking in a surplice.
Being a cavalier in sentiment, he was ejected from his vicarage in 1648,
and went to London, where he assumed the lay habit. In 1647 he published
_Hesperides_, a collection of small poems of great lyric beauty,
Anacreontic, pastoral, and amatory, but containing much that is coarse and
indelicate. In 1648 he in part atoned for these by publishing his _Noble
Numbers_, a collection of pious pieces, in the beginning of which he asks
God's forgiveness for his "unbaptized rhymes," "writ in my wild,
unhallowed times.
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