...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._ Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin's Chapel at Loretto. He is best known to the general reader by his _Wishes for his Unknown Mistress_, That not impossible she which is included in most of the anthologies. His religious poetry expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St. Theresa, "undaunted daughter of desires," who is the subject of a splendid apostrophe in his poem, _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is, in fact, a poet of passages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits. In one of his Latin epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana: Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum: as englished by Dryden, The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed. Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the _Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed the exiled court to France. Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers--Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others--gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs--_To Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which occur the lines,