LIFE.  Herbert’s life is so quiet and uneventful that to relate a few biographical facts can be of little advantage.  Only as one reads the whole story by Izaak Walton can he share the gentle spirit of Herbert’s poetry.  He was born at Montgomery Castle,[163] Wales, 1593, of a noble Welsh family.  His university course was brilliant, and after graduation he waited long years in the vain hope of preferment at court.  All his life he had to battle against disease, and this is undoubtedly the cause of the long delay before each new step in his course.  Not till he was thirty-seven was he ordained and placed over the little church of Bemerton.  How he lived here among plain people, in “this happy corner of the Lord’s field, hoping all things and blessing all people, asking his own way to Sion and showing others the way,” should be read in Walton.  It is a brief life, less than three years of work before being cut off by consumption, but remarkable for the single great purpose and the glorious spiritual strength that shine through physical weakness.  Just before his death he gave some manuscripts to a friend, and his message is worthy of John Bunyan: 

Deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.  Desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it, for I and it are less than the least of God’s mercies.

HERBERT’S POEMS. Herbert’s chief work, The Temple, consists of over one hundred and fifty short poems suggested by the Church, her holidays and ceremonials, and the experiences of the Christian life.  The first poem, “The Church Porch,” is the longest and, though polished with a care that foreshadows the classic school, the least poetical.  It is a wonderful collection of condensed sermons, wise precepts, and moral lessons, suggesting Chaucer’s “Good Counsel,” Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and Polonius’s advice to Laertes, in Hamlet; only it is more packed with thought than any of these.  Of truth-speaking he says: 

    Dare to be true.  Nothing can need a lie;
    A fault which needs it most grows two thereby.

and of calmness in argument: 

    Calmness is great advantage:  he that lets
    Another chafe may warm him at his fire.

Among the remaining poems of The Temple one of the most suggestive is “The Pilgrimage.”  Here in six short stanzas, every line close-packed with thought, we have the whole of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  The poem was written probably before Bunyan was born, but remembering the wide influence of Herbert’s poetry, it is an interesting question whether Bunyan received the idea of his immortal work from this “Pilgrimage.”  Probably the best known of all his poems is the one called “The Pulley,” which generally appears, however under the name “Rest,” or “The Gifts of God.”