..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.
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