The Poems of George Herbert

George Herbert, 1593 - 1633, younger brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was born in Montgomery and educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Public Orator, 1619 - 27. After taking orders, he accepted in 1630 the living of Bemerton in Wiltshire, and there the short remainder of his life was spent. The Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, containing almost his entire work in verse, appeared in the year of his death, and has rarely since that time failed to command recognition as a supreme contribution both to poetry and to the literature of devotion. His chief prose work, A Priest to the Temple, was not published until 1652. Izaak Walton's classic short Life of George Herbert came out in 1670.