I think if we compare these two poems, which embody Herrick’s attitude to nature and country life during the Dean Prior period, with some of the earlier (as I think) lyrics in the _Hesperides_, we shall feel that if Dean Prior took something from him, it also gave him something. Compare them, for instance, with “Fair Daffodils, we weep to see,” or the song to “Meddows,” which begins “Ye have been fresh and green.” These last are beautiful fancies, among the most beautiful in our language, but they have not the depth or fulness of feeling which the triplet has. _That_ breathes the spirit of the true lover of rural life, and so it seems to me that if Herrick, in this little out-of-the-way village, felt the lyric power gone, if the “fairy fancies” no longer “ranged” or “lightly stirred” as before, on the other hand, something of the peace of a country village, something of the peace which Wordsworth felt two centuries later, had descended upon him. Finally, let me call the reader’s attention to the two “Graces for little children,” also to be found in _Noble Numbers_:— Here a little child I stand, Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee For a Benison to fall On our meat and on us all. And again— What God gives and what we take, ’Tis a gift for Christ His sake; Be the meal of beans and pease, God be thanked for those and these. Have we flesh or have we fish, All are fragments from His dish. He His Church save and the King, And our peace here like a spring Send it ever flourishing. If I may indulge in a little fancy, I should say that this last was written for some small Dean Prior “maid”; written on one of those delicious balmy days which a Devonshire spring sometimes, though not, alas! always, brings; written during the first half of Herrick’s first incumbency, when peace still “flourished” at Dean Prior, though perhaps the shadows of the coming trouble were not unfelt by those who could read the signs of the times. Both these “Graces” always seem to me to have a peculiar charm and freshness, and even by themselves they would go far to justify the view that has been maintained in this essay, that Herrick’s genius, if hampered and enfeebled in some ways, was in other ways matured and mellowed by his sojourn in “dull Devonshire.” The following passage, which is an extract from an article in the _Quarterly_ of August, 1809, by Mr. Barron Field, may be of some interest:—