The Caroline Country Parson: George Herbert

Abstract

It sometimes occurs to me, as I know it does to others, to see an historical period in an image, a pictured scene, a landscape of the mind, as if one looked into some old mirror and saw there the shapes, the figures it had beheld in that time past, the sunlight and clouds passing of three hundred years ago. When I think of the quiet, peaceful decade before the Civil War, when Charles was King and Laud building the garden-front of St. John’s at Oxford, it is always early summer. I see the blue sky with white feathery clouds and those figures walking with grave seventeenth-century tread up and down the terraces of some great house, as it might be Wilton or Great Tew, where Falkland walked in the shades with Hobbes and Sidney Godolphin. It is Sunday; the church bells are stilled, yet there is music in the village away beyond the park-pale; and within, there is the drone of bees busy among the rosemary and musk and lavender: they have a nest in the church porch next the house. The figures upon the terrace group and regroup themselves while discoursing upon poetry and the times. I cannot hear what they are saying; now they pause — there is a rustle of satin upon stone — and look out over the parterres and English fields to where there is a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand upon the horizon.