These have been costly gifts to our benefactors. "I honor," says Vaughan, "that temper which can lay by the garland when he might keep it on; which can pass by a rosebud and bid it grow when he is invited to crop it." This is the spirit of self-devotion in every worthy action, and especially of the pains and penalties by which poets have enriched our daily life. We are indebted to the poets, too, for something more than the alleviation of sorrow. Perhaps it is, upon the whole, a rarer gift to improve prosperity. Joy, commonly, is less of a positive feeling than grief, and is more apt to slip by us unconsciously. Few people, says the proverb, know when they are well off. It is the poet's vocation to teach the world this--
--"to be possess'd with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet."
The poet lifts our eyes to the beauties of external nature, educates us to a keener participation in the sweet joys of affection, to the loveliness and grace of woman, to the honor and strength of manhood. His ideal world thus becomes an actual one, as the creations of imagination first borrowed from sense, alight from the book, the picture or the statue once again to live and walk among us.
The resemblances which have induced us to bring together our sacred triumvirate of poets, are the common period in which they lived, their similar training in youth, a congenial bond of learning, a certain generous family condition, the inspiration of the old mother church out of which they sprung, the familiar discipline of sorrow, the early years in which they severally wrote.
A brief glance at their respective lives may indicate still further these similarities and point a moral which needs not many words to express--which seems to us almost too sacred to be loudly or long dwelt upon.
Herbert was the oldest of the band, having been born near the close of the sixteenth century, in the days of James, who was an intelligent patron of the family. The poet's brother, the learned Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose "Autobiography" breathes the fresh manly spirit of the best days of chivalry, was the king's ambassador to France. George Herbert, too, was in a fair way to this court patronage, when his hopes were checked by the death of the monarch. It is a circumstance, this court favor, worth considering in the poet's life, as the antecedent to his manifold spirit of piety. Nothing is more noticeable than the wide, liberal culture of the old English poets; they were first, men, often skilled in affairs, with ample experience in life, and then--poets.