ABSTRACT
There are many features about Robert Herrick's poems which single them out as peculiar to the most incurious observer. No other poet, perhaps, who lived so long, and who would seem to have continued the practice of poesy through so large a part of his life, survives as the author of a single volume only. The division of the poems into divine and human is common enough: but there is another division in the human poems themselves which must have very often suggested itself to readers. Herrick simply continued Drayton with a less masculine though perhaps a more delicate conception of the fairy theory of their day. Donne is a far "greater" poet than Herrick, and moves in a far higher sphere, both of poetry and passion. In the service of Bacchus, as distinguished from that of Venus, Herrick is meretricious rather than absolutely accomplished.
