For eighteen years Herrick lived in his Devonshire home, and we
know little of these years.  But he thought sadly at times of the
gay days that were gone.  “Ah, Ben!” he writes to Jonson,
        “Say how, or when
        Shall we thy guests
    Meet at 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
    Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine.”

Yet he was not without comforts and companions in his country parsonage.  His good and faithful servant Prue kept house for him, and he surrounded himself with pets.  He had a pet lamb, a dog, a cat, and even a pet pig which he taught to drink out of a mug.

        “Though Clock,
    To tell how night draws hence, I’ve none,
        A Cock
    I have, to sing how day draws on. 
        I have
    A maid (my Prue) by good luck sent,
        To save
    That little, Fates me gave or lent. 
        A Hen
    I keep, which, creeking* day by day,
        Tells when
    She goes her long white egg to lay. 
        A Goose
    I have, which, with a jealous ear,
        Lets loose
    Her tongue, to tell what danger’s near. 
        A Lamb
    I keep, tame, with my morsels fed,
        Whose Dam
    An orphan left him, lately dead. 
        A Cat
    I keep, that plays about my house,
        Grown fat
    With eating many a miching** mouse. 
        To these
    A Tracy*** I do keep, whereby
        I please
    The more my rural privacy,
        Which are
    But toys to give my heart some ease;
        Where care
    None is, slight things do lightly please.”

    Clucking.
    *Thieving.
    ***His spaniel.

But Herrick did not love his country home and parish or his people.  We are told that the gentry round about loved him “for his florid and witty discourses.”  But his people do not seem to have loved these same discourses, for we are also told that one day in anger he threw his sermon from the pulpit at them because they did not listen attentively.  He says:—­

    “More discontents I never had,
        Since I was born, than here,
    Where I have been, and still am sad,
        In this dull Devonshire.”

Yet though Herrick hated Devonshire, or at least said so, it was this same wild country that called forth some of his finest poems.  He himself knew that, for in the next lines he goes on to say:—­

    “Yet justly, too, I must confess
        I ne’er invented such
    Ennobled numbers for the press,
        Than where I loathed so much.”