Herrick lived farthest away from London of all her poets, and when he grew weary of "dull Devonshire" and its people, he longed to be back in "golden Cheapside," his birthplace, and at "the lyric feasts of the London taverns.
He must have felt, in those moments, much what Dr. Johnson felt when he said that in London a man stored his mind better than anywhere else, and that in the country his body might be feasted but his mind was starved.
That was what Herrick was thinking when in his verses on "His Returne to London," he spoke of her "everlasting 'plenty." One cannot help wondering what difference it would have made to his poetry had he refused, as Dr. Johnson did, to become a country clergyman.
Would he not have sung as well in London of Julia and Electra, of brides and bridegrooms, and even his songs" of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers"? For London was then a little city and Surrey and Middlesex very near.
In his farewell to Thames ("silver footed" he called her, as he called his Julia), he writes of the rural delights of the City, of bathing in the crystal Thames, and of journeys in barges, decked with boughs and rushes, in company of "soft smooth Virgins for our chaste disport." (Which shows that an afternoon up the river three centuries ago was in some ways not very different from what it is today.)
Herrick longed to return to London. Cowley longed to leave her. He desired "almost to covetousness," a small house and a large garden. He wrote God the first Garden made, and the first city, Cain.
He found in London no more than "the stings and buzz and murmurings" of a great hive. Yet even he, when he wrote his poem "On the Queen's Repairing Somerset House," was moved to more than complimentary verse as he looked from that house - which was then right above the water's edge - up and down "the glorious bow" of the river, down to old St. Paul's and London Bridge and the houses of that wondrous Street Which rides o'er the broad river like a Fleet while "the gentle Thames strengthened by the sea," and caught between the narrow arches of the bridge, "roared and foamed" through them.
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