Hesperides

“ So there he was again, a fishy, scaly, web-footed sort of personage, with something like a tuft of seaweed at his chin.
"Pray, what do you want with me?" cried the Old One, as soon as he could take breath; for it is quite a tiresome affair to go through so many false shapes. "Why do you squeeze me so hard? Let me go this moment, or I shall begin to consider you an extremely uncivil person!"
"My name is Hercules!" roared the mighty stranger. "And you will never get out of my clutch until you tell me the nearest way to the garden of the Hesperides!" ”

“ His Noble Numbers or Pious Pieces was pub. in 1647, his Hesperides or Works both Human and Divine in 1648, and the two together in one vol. in the latter year. Over 60, however, of the lighter poems included in Hesperides had previously appeared anonymously in a collection entitled Wit's Recreations. H.'s early life in London had been a free one, and his secular poems, in which he appears much more at ease than in his sacred, show him to have been a thorough Epicurean, though he claims that his life was not to be judged by his muse. ”

“ And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed
Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since
Of faery damsels met in forest wide
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 360
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore. ”

“ And again the goddess murky Night, though she lay with none, bare Blame and painful Woe, and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean. Also she bare the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, [10] who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty. ”

“ The most difficult labor of all was getting the golden apples of the Hesperides, for Hercules did not know where to find them. These were the apples which Juno had received at her wedding from the goddess of the Earth, and which she had intrusted to the keeping of the daughters of Hesperus, assisted by a watchful dragon. After various adventures Hercules arrived at Mount Atlas in Africa. Atlas was one of the Titans who had warred against the gods, and after they were subdued, Atlas was condemned to bear on his shoulders the weight of the heavens. ”

“ The tradition apparently rests on no better basis than Herrick's Christian name, and of the poems in the issues of the Almanack which I have seen, it may be said, that, while the worst of them, save for some lack of neatness of turn, might conceivably have been by Herrick—on the principle that if Herrick could write some of his epigrams, he could write anything—the more ambitious poems it is quite impossible to attribute to the author of the Hesperides. But apart from opinion, the negative evidence is overwhelming. ”

“ Apples of Hesperides Glinting golden through the trees, Apples of Hesperides! Through the moon-pierced warp of night Shoot pale shafts of yellow light, Swaying to the kissing breeze Swings the treasure, golden-gleaming, Apples of Hesperides! Far and lofty yet they glimmer, Apples of Hesperides! Blinded by their radiant shimmer, Pushing forward just for these; Dew-besprinkled, bramble-marred, Poor duped mortal, travel-scarred, Always thinking soon to seize And possess the golden-glistening Apples of Hesperides! Orbed, and glittering, and pendent, Apples of Hesperides! ”

“ As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument (notoriously false to history and to human nature) that a man who could write the looser Hesperides could not sincerely write the Noble Numbers. Every student of the lives of other men—every student of his own heart—knows, or should know, that this is an utter mistake. ”

“ To be with juice of cedar washed all over. Horace's "linenda cedro," as in Hesperides.
Evadne. See Note to Hesperides 575.
The New Charon. First printed in "Lachrymae Musarum. The tears of the Muses: exprest in Elegies written by divers persons of Nobility and Worth, upon the death of the most hopefull Henry, Lord Hastings.... Collected and set forth by R [ichard] B [rome] . London, 1649." This is the only poem which we know of Herrick's, written after 1648, and even in this Herrick uses materials already employed in "Charon and the Nightingale" in Hesperides. ”

“ Composed by M. Henry Lawes. See Hesperides 851, and Note.
102. The Star-Song. This may have been composed partly with reference to the noonday star during the Thanksgiving for Charles II.'s birth. See Hesperides 213, and Note.
We'll choose him King. A reference to the Twelfth Night games. See Hesperides 1035, and Note.
108. Good men afflicted most. Taken almost entirely from Seneca, de Provid. 3, 4: Ignem experitur [Fortuna] in Mucio, paupertatem in Fabricio, ... tormenta in Regulo, venenum in [Pg 306] Socrate, mortem in Catone. ”

“ See 223, 293, from which it is a pity that this poem should have been divorced. Of the Palace there are as many as three MS. versions, viz., Add. 22, 603 (p. 59) , and Add. 25, 303 (p. 157) , at the British Museum, both of which I have collated, and Ashmole MS. 38, which I only know through my predecessors. The three MSS. appear to agree very harmoniously, and they unite in increasing our knowledge of Herrick by a passage of twenty-seven lines, following on the words "And here and there and farther off," and in lieu of the next four and a half lines in Hesperides. ”

“ I introduce this into the text from the Museum manuscript as agreeing with the
"Well, I can quaff, I see,
To th' number five
Or nine"
of A Bacchanalian Verse (Hesperides 653) , on which see Note. Dr. Grosart explains the Ashmole reading Wine by the Note "οἶνος and vinum both give five, the number of perfection"; but this seems too far-fetched for Herrick.
Kiss, so depart. By a strange freak Ashmole MS. writes Guesse, and the Museum MS. Ghesse; but the emendation Kiss (adopted both by Dr. Grosart and Mr. Hazlitt) cannot be doubted. ”

“ You say, you love me; that I thus must prove, 383. You say you're young; but when your teeth are told, 390. You say you'll kiss me, and I thank you for it, 394.
Transcriber's Endnotes
Numeration Errors in the Hesperides:
Without an obvious solution to a discrepancy the numbers remain as originally printed, however the following alterations have been made to ensure any details in the NOTES section apply to the relevant poem.
Page 290. Note to 923. "924" changed to 923. "923. Revenge. Tacitus, Hist. iv." Page 295. Note to 967. "726" changed to 724. "967. Upon his spaniel, Tracy. Cp. ”

“ Et tegitur felix, nec tamen uva latet:
Femineum lucet sic per bombycina corpus,
Calculus in nitidâ sic numeratur aquâ.
197. The Welcome to Sack. Two MSS. at the British Museum (Harl. 6931 and Add. 19,268) contain copies of this important poem. These copies differ considerably from the printed version, are proved by small variations to be independent of each other, and at the same time agree in all important points. We may conclude, therefore, that they represent an earlier version of the poem, subsequently revised by Herrick before the issue of Hesperides. ”

“ Well doing's the fruit of doing well. Seneca, de Clem. i. 1: Rectè factorum verus fructus [est] fecisse. Also Ep. 81: Recte facti fecisse merces est. The latter, and Cicero, de Finib. II. xxii. 72, are quoted by Montaigne, Ess. II. xvi.
A Carol presented to Dr. Williams. From Ashmole MS. 36, 298. For Dr. Williams, see Note to Hesperides 146. This poem was apparently written in 1640, after the removal of the bishop's suspension.
His Mistress to him at his Farewell. From Add. [Pg 315] MS. 11, 811, at the British Museum, where it is signed "Ro. Herrick". ”

“ Or, A Pleasant Grove for their Wits to Walke in. Of Epigrams, 700: Epitaphs, 200: Fancies, a number: Fantasticks, [Pg 318] abundance. With their Addition, Multiplication, and Division. London, Printed by M. Simmons," etc. In this edition many of the Epigrams are omitted and more than one hundred fresh ones added. Additions are also made to the Epitaphs and Fancies and Fantasticks. Of the new Epigrams and Poems no less than seventy-two had been printed two years earlier in Herrick's Hesperides, and ten others were added in 1654 from the same source. ”

“ Very well, uncle; I feel quite tempted to fail, to inveigle you into a sensible termination to a foolish story. We often invent tales in the interval at school, and I'll give you one that my schoolmates like. It is called
[Pg 253] ;
The Rose of Hesperus; A FAIRY TALE.
Every one has heard of the Garden of Hesperus, famous in all ancient times for its exquisite beauty. Its golden fruit, more precious by far than the fleece of Jason, in search of which heroes perilled their lives on board the good ship Argo, was watched by a terrible dragon, whose eyes were never sealed by slumber. ”

“ Conspicuous above them all in beauty and brightness was the earth itself, which, being then in opposition, was at its least distance from the observers. When in that position, the earth presents to the Hesperians a much more brilliant object than their planet does to us. For, though not receiving as great a supply of light from the sun as Hesperos does, this deficiency is far more than balanced by the fact that, when in opposition, the whole of the illuminated face of the earth is visible at Hesperos, while only an exceedingly thin crescent of Hesperos is visible at the earth. ”

“ Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer: "Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam—dear Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. ”

“ Clotilda, the Hesper of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and vinegar-eel in body and soul, peaked in all respects, in chin, nose, wit, head, lips, and shoulder. ”

“ It was Hesperia who spoke, as she so often did on all subjects, to these devoted spirit-fledglings, and they listened to her respectfully, for she was an experienced and wise woman, who had watched the fevers and frailties of humanity age after age, and race after race, as each individual, filled with the consciousness of being, wriggled, like the newly egg-hatched snake, thinking that all creation must be concerned about its agile motions. ”

“ When I said that the apparent ages of the new created or imported Hesperians varied between twenty and sixty years, I did not mean to intimate, and the reader is not to infer, that anything in the slightest degree resembling the horrible condition of the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg has place in Hesperos. Far from it; the dependence of the bodily organism on the age of the individual in that planet has no analogy with the progressive decay of the wretched Struldbrug; it follows a more complicated law. ”

“ The dew was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards down the road. Lonely spaces everywhere, above and around. Only Hesperus hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn and remote; yet infinitely heartening, somehow, in his valorous isolation. ”

“ As the star Hesperus, which is placed the brightest star in heaven, [13] proceeds among other stars in the unseasonable time of night, so it shone from the well-sharpened spear which Achilles, designing mischief to noble Hector, brandished in his right hand, eyeing his fair person, where it would best yield. But the beautiful brazen armor, of which he had despoiled great Patroclus, having slain him, covered the rest of his body so much; yet did there appear [a part] where the collar-bones separate the neck from the shoulders, and where the destruction of life is most speedy. ”

“ This is the reason why I described the northern and southern Hesperian hemispheres as mutually inaccessible. No ship constructed by mortal hands could approach this pandemonium and live. We shall see, farther on, that, after the lapse of many ages, counting from the first appearance of rational life, the transit was effected in a wholly unexpected manner. This transit led to a most awful discovery, and with this discovery we shall see that the Modern History of Hesperos begins. ”

“ The 'Shield of Hercules' survives as a sample, if indeed it is to be received as Hesiod's work. Its theme is a single adventure of Hercules, his combat with Cycnus and his father, the war-god, near Apollo's Temple at Pagasæ. Shorn of a preface of fifty-six verses borrowed from the 'Catalogue of Women,' and having for their burden the artifice of Zeus with Alcmena, which resulted in the birth of Hercules, a preface manifestly in the wrong place, the 'Shield' is a fairly compact poem, constructed as a frame for the description of the hero's buckler, to which the rest of the poem is ancillary. ”

“ The best wedded love is not what the maidenly was; and so, too, is there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are so innocent and good; and all blossoms come so pure-white into the world, in which by and by,—as Goethe says, [2] even of material colors, "The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled and unchanged. ”