This expression, from a secretary of the present time, would be

considered as merely ludicrous, or at most as an ostentatious display of

scholarship; but the manners of that time were so tinged with

superstition, that I cannot but suspect Cowley of having consulted on

this great occasion the Virgilian lots, and to have given some credit to

the answer of his oracle.

Some years afterwards, “business,” says Sprat, “passed of course into

other hands;” and Cowley, being no longer useful at Paris, was in 1656

sent back into England, that, “under pretence of privacy and retirement,

he might take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this

nation.”

Soon after his return to London, he was seized by some messengers of the

usurping powers, who were sent out in quest of another man; and being

examined, was put into confinement, from which he was not dismissed

without the security of a thousand pounds given by Dr. Scarborough.

This year he published his poems, with a preface, in which he seems to

have inserted something suppressed in subsequent editions, which was

interpreted to denote some relaxation of his loyalty. In this preface he

declares, that “his desire had been for some days past, and did still

very vehemently continue, to retire himself to some of the American

plantations, and to forsake this world for ever.”

From the obloquy which the appearance of submission to the usurpers

brought upon him, his biographer has been very diligent to clear him, and

indeed it does not seem to have lessened his reputation. His wish for

retirement we can easily believe to be undissembled; a man harassed in

one kingdom, and persecuted in another, who, after a course of business

that employed all his days and half his nights, in ciphering and

deciphering, comes to his own country and steps into a prison, will be

willing enough to retire to some place of quiet and of safety. Yet let

neither our reverence for a genius, nor our pity for a sufferer, dispose

us to forget, that, if his activity was virtue, his retreat was

cowardice.

He then took upon him the character of physician, still, according to

Sprat, with intention “to dissemble the main design of his coming over;”

and, as Mr. Wood relates, “complying with the men then in power (which

was much taken notice of by the royal party), he obtained an order to be

created doctor of physic; which being done to his mind (whereby he gained

the ill-will of some of his friends), he went into France again, having

made a copy of verses on Oliver’s death.”

This is no favourable representation; yet even in this not much wrong can

be discovered. How far he complied with the men in power is to be

inquired before he can be blamed. It is not said that he told them any

secrets, or assisted them by intelligence or any other act. If he only

promised to be quiet, that they in whose hands he was might free him from

confinement, he did what no law of society prohibits.

The man whose miscarriage in a just cause has put him in the power of his

enemy, may, without any breach of his integrity, regain his liberty, or

preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality: for the stipulation gives

the enemy nothing which he had not before. The neutrality of a captive

may be always secured by his imprisonment or death. He that is at the

disposal of another may not promise to aid him in any injurious act,

because no power can compel active obedience. He may engage to do

nothing, but not to do ill.

There is reason to think that Cowley promised little. It does not appear

that his compliance gained him confidence enough to be trusted without

security, for the bond of his bail was never cancelled; nor that it made

him think himself secure, for, at that dissolution of government which

followed the death of Oliver, he returned into France, where he resumed

his former station, and stayed till the restoration.

“He continued,” says his biographer, “under these bonds till the general

deliverance;” it is therefore to be supposed that he did not go to

France, and act again for the king, without the consent of his bondsman:

that he did not show his loyalty at the hazard of his friend, but by his

friend’s permission.

Of the verses on Oliver’s death, in which Wood’s narrative seems to imply

something encomiastic, there has been no appearance. There is a

discourse concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but

such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of

usurpation.

A doctor of physic, however, he was made at Oxford in December, 1657; and

in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account has been

published by Dr. Birch, he appears busy among the experimental

philosophers with the title of Doctor Cowley.

There is no reason for supposing that he ever attempted practice: but his

preparatory studies have contributed something to the honour of his

country. Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into

Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study

affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany in the mind

of Cowley turned into poetry. He composed, in Latin, several books on

plants, of which the first and second display the qualities of herbs, in

elegiac verse; the third and fourth, the beauties of flowers, in various

measures; and the fifth and sixth, the use of trees, in heroic numbers.

At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great

poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles,

but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry; in which the English,

till their works and May’s poem appeared, seemed unable to contest the

palm with any other of the lettered nations.

If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared (for May I

hold to be superior to both), the advantage seems to lie on the side of

Cowley. Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the

ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or

elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions.

At the Restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and with

consciousness, not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity of

great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he

might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph. But

this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably

disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed. He had

been promised, by both Charles the First and Second, the mastership of

the Savoy; “but he lost it,” says Wood, “by certain persons, enemies to

the Muses.”

The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having by such

alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of “The Guardian”

for the stage, he produced it under the title of “The Cutter of Coleman

Street.” It was treated on the stage with great severity, and was

afterwards censured as a satire on the king’s party.

Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Sprat to the first exhibition, related to

Mr. Dennis, “that, when they told Cowley how little favour had been shown

him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much firmness

as might have been expected from so great a man.”

What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot

be known. He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he

that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to

himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has

a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the

whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame,

by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.

For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the reason: it

certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention and

exciting merriment. From the charge of disaffection he exculpates

himself in his preface, by observing how unlikely it is, that, having

followed the royal family through all their distresses, “he should choose

the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them.” It appears,

however, from the theatrical register of Downes the prompter, to have

been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists.

That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his pretensions

and his discontent in an ode called “The Complaint;” in which he styles

himself the _melancholy_ Cowley. This met with the usual fortune of

complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity.

These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in some

stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureate; a mode of

satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling, perhaps

every generation of poets has been teased.

Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court,

Making apologies for his bad play;

Every one gave him so good a report,

That Apollo gave heed to all he could say:

Nor would he have had, ’tis thought, a rebuke,

Unless he had done some notable folly;

Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,

Or printed his pitiful Melancholy.

His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him. “Not

finding,” says the morose Wood, “that preferment conferred upon him which

he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he

retired discontented into Surrey.”

“He was now,” says the courtly Sprat, “weary of the vexations and

formalities of an active condition. He had been perplexed with a long

compliance to foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a court;

which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet

nothing could make it quiet. Those were the reasons that moved him to

follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest

throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and represented

to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and

a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune.”

So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shown! But

actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley certainly

retired; first to Barn Elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surrey. He

seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the _hum of men_. He

thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, without the defence of

mountains and oceans; and, instead of seeking shelter in America, wisely

went only so far from the bustle of life as that he might easily find his

way back when solitude should grow tedious. His retreat was at first but

slenderly accommodated; yet he soon obtained, by the interest of the Earl

of St. Alban’s, and the Duke of Buckingham, such lease of the queen’s

lands as afforded him an ample income.

By the lovers of virtue and of wit it will be solicitously asked, if he

now was happy. Let them peruse one of his letters accidentally preserved

by Peck, which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter

pant for solitude.

“TO DR. THOMAS SPRAT,

“_Chertsey_, _May_ 21, 1665.

“The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold, with a

defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days. And, two

after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable

to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal fortune here

to begin with. And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and

have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my

neighbours. What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows;

if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging. Another

misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have

broke your word with me and failed to come, even though you told Mr.

Bois that you would. This is what they call _monstri simile_. I do

hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days (though

it be uncertain yet whether I shall ever recover it) as to walk about

again. And then, methinks, you and I and the dean might be very

merry upon St. Ann’s Hill. You might very conveniently come hither

the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night. I write this in

pain, and can say no more: _verbum sapienti_.”

He did not long enjoy the pleasure or suffer the uneasiness of solitude;

for he died at the Porch-house in Chertsey, in 1667 [28th July], in the

forty-ninth year of his age.

He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer and Spenser; and King Charles

pronounced, “That Mr. Cowley had not left behind him a better man in

England.” He is represented by Dr. Sprat as the most amiable of mankind;

and this posthumous praise may safely be credited, as it has never been

contradicted by envy or by faction.

Such are the remarks and memorials which I have been able to add to the

narrative of Dr. Sprat; who, writing when the feuds of civil war were yet

recent, and the minds of either party were easily irritated, was obliged

to pass over many transactions in general expressions, and to leave

curiosity often unsatisfied. What he did not tell cannot, however, now

be known; I must therefore recommend the perusal of his work, to which my

narration can be considered only as a slender supplement.

Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead

of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the minds of

men, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too

much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man,

has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different

forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of

writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom, in a

criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some

account.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning

was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme,

instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such

verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the

modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by

counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism had rightly denominated poetry τéχνη μιμητικὴ,

_an imitative art_, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their

right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated

anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms

of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden

confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne

in wit; but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.

If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often

thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never

attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in

their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account

of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural

dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of

language.

If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as

wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is,

upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which

he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the

metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but

seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the

reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently

by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more

rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of _discordia

concors_; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult

resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they

have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by

violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations,

comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety

surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought,

and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred that

they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. As

they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they

had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to

conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they

never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but

wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings

looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as epicurean

deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of

life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of

fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say

what they hoped had been never said before.

Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for they

never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once

fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden

astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced

by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always

general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in

descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety

that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles,

is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those

writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of

greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into

fragments; and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and

laboured particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life,

than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide

effulgence of a summer noon.

What they wanted, however, of the sublime they endeavoured to supply by

hyperbole; their amplifications had no limits; they left not only reason

but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused

magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be

imagined.

Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost; if

they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise

sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far

fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it

was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a

metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions

copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by

traditional imagery, and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme, and

volubility of syllables.

In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised

either by recollection or inquiry; something already learned is to be

retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If their greatness seldom

elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not

always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are

employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has

thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found

buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know

their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and

polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety

though less copiousness of sentiment.

This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his

followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very

extensive and various knowledge, and by Jonson, whose manner resembled

that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his

sentiments.

When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators than

time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any

remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley,

Clieveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by

improving the harmony of our members. Milton tried the metaphysic style

only in his lines upon Hobson the carrier. Cowley adopted it, and

excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment and more music.

Suckling neither improved versification nor abounded in conceits. The

fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach

it, and Milton disdained it.

Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples; and I have

therefore collected instances of the modes of writing by which this

species of poets (for poets they were called by themselves and their

admirers) was eminently distinguished.

As the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being admired

than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of

learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry. Thus,

Cowley on Knowledge:

The sacred tree ’midst the fair orchard grew;

The phœnix truth did on it rest,

And built his perfumed nest,

That right Porphyrian tree which did true logic show.

Each leaf did learned notions give,

And the apples were demonstrative;

So clear their colour and divine,

The very shads they cast did other lights outshine.

On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age:

Love was with thy life entwined,

Close as heat with fire is join’d;

A powerful brand prescribed the date

Of thine, like Meleager’s fate.

Th’ antiperistasis of age

More enflam’d thy amorous rage.

In the following verses we have an allusion to a rabbinical opinion

concerning manna:

Variety I ask not: give me one

To live perpetually upon.

The person Love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.

Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses:

In everything there naturally grows

A balsamum to keep it fresh and new,

If ’twere not injured by extrinsic blows:

Your youth and beauty are this balm in you.

But you, of learning and religion,

And virtue and such ingredients, have made

A mithridate, whose operation

Keeps off, or cures what can be done or said.

Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year, have

something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant:

This twilight of two years, not past nor next,

Some emblem is of me, or I of this,

Who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext,

Whose what and where in disputation is,

If I should call me anything, should miss.

I sum the years and me, and find me not

Debtor to th’ old, nor creditor to th’ new.

That cannot say, my thanks I have forget,

Nor trust I this with hopes; and yet scarce true

This bravery is, since these times show’d me you.—DONNE.

Yet more abstruse and profound is Donne’s reflection upon man as a

microcosm:

If men be worlds, there is in every one

Something to answer in some proportion;

All the world’s riches; and in good men, this

Virtue, our form’s form, and our soul’s soul, is

Of thoughts so far-fetched, as to be not only unexpected, but unnatural,

all their books are full.

To a lady, who wrote posies for rings:

They, who above do various circles find,

Say, like a ring, th’ equator Heaven does bind

When Heaven shall be adorned by thee,

(Which then more Heaven than ’tis will be)

’Tis thou must write the poesy there,

For it wanteth one as yet,

Then the sun pass through’t twice a year,

The sun, which is esteem’d the god of wit.—COWLEY.

The difficulties which have been raised about identity in philosophy are

by Cowley, with still more perplexity applied to love:

Five years ago (says story) I loved you,

For which you call me most inconstant now;

Pardon me, madam, you mistake the man;

For I am not the same that I was then:

No flesh is now the same ’twas then in me,

And that my mind is changed yourself may see.

The same thoughts to retain still, and intents

Were more inconstant far; for accidents

Must of all things most strangely inconstant prove,

If from one subject they t’ another move;

My members then the father members were,

From whence these take their birth, which now are here

If then this body love what th’ other did,

’Twere incest, which by nature is forbid.

The love of different women is, in geographical poetry, compared to

travels through different countries:

Hast thou not found each woman’s breast

(The land where thou hast travelled)

Either by savages possest,

Or wild, and uninhabited?

What joy could’st take, or what repose,

In countries so uncivilis’d as those?

Lust, the scorching dog-star, here

Rages with immoderate heat;

Whilst Pride, the ragged northern bear,

In others makes the cold too great.

And where these are temperate known,

The soil’s all barren sand, or rocky stone.—COWLEY.

A lover, burnt up by his affection, is compared to Egypt:

The fate of Egypt I sustain,

And never feel the dew of rain,

From clouds which in the head appear;

But all my too-much moisture ewe

To overflowings of the heart below.—COWLEY.

The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury

and rites of sacrifice:

And yet this death of mine, I fear,

Will ominous to her appear:

When, sound in every other part,

Her sacrifice is found without an heart.

For the last tempest of my death

Shall sigh out that too, with my breath.

That the chaos was harmonised, has been recited of old; but whence the

different sounds arose remained for a modern to discover:

Th’ ungovern’d parts no correspondence knew;

An artless war from thwarting motions grew;

Till they to number and fixed rules were brought.

Water and air he for the tenor chose,

Earth made the base; the treble flame arose.—COWLEY.

The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account; but Donne has

extended them into worlds. If the lines are not easily understood, they

may be read again:

On a round ball

A workman, that hath copies by, can lay

An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,

And quickly make that which was nothing, all.

So doth each tear,

Which thee doth wear,

A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,

Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow

This world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so.

On reading the following lines, the reader may perhaps cry out “Confusion

worse confounded.”

Hers lies a she sun, and a he moon here,

She gives the best light to his sphere,

Or each is both, and all, and so,

They unto one another nothing owe.—DONNE.

Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?

Though God be our true glass through which we see

All, since the being of all things is He,

Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive

Things in proportion fit, by perspective

Deeds of good men; for by their living here,

Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.

Who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many remote

ideas could be brought together?

Since ’tis my doom, love’s undershrieve,

Why this reprieve?

Why doth my she advowson fly

Incumbency?

To sell thyself dust thou intend

By candles end,

And hold the contract thus in doubt,

Life’s taper out?

Think but how soon the market fails,

Your sex lives faster than the males;

And if to measure age’s span,

The sober Julian were th’ account of man,

Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian.—CLEVELAND.

Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples:

By every wind that comes this way,

Send me at least a sigh or two,

Such and so many I’ll repay

As shall themselves make winds to get to you.—COWLEY.

In tears I’ll waste these eyes,

By love so vainly fed:

So lust of old the deluge punished.—COWLEY.

All arm’d in brass, the richest dress of war,

(A dismal glorious sight!) he shone afar.

The sun himself started with sudden fright,

To see his beams return so dismal bright.—COWLEY.

A universal consternation:

His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws

Tear up the ground; then runs he wild about,

Lashing his angry tail and roaring out.

Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there;

Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear;

Silence and horror fill the place around;

Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound.—COWLEY.

Their fictions were often violent and unnatural.

Of his mistress bathing:

The fish around her crowded, as they do

To the false light that treacherous fishers show,

And all with as much ease might taken be,

As she at first took me;

For ne’er did light so clear

Among the waves appear,

Though every night the sun himself set there.—COWLEY.

The poetical effect of a lover’s name upon glass:

My name engraved herein

Both contribute my firmness to this glass:

Which, ever since that charm, hath been

As hard as that which graved it was.—DONNE.

Their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling. On an inconstant

woman:

He enjoys the calmy sunshine now,

And no breath stirring hears,

In the clear heaven of thy brow

No smallest cloud appears.

He sees thee gentle, fair and gay,

And trusts the faithless April of thy May.—COWLEY.

Upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire:

Nothing yet in thee is seen,

But when a genial heat warms thee within,

A new-born wood of various lines there grows;

Hers buds an L, and there a B,

Here sprouts a V, and there a T,

And all the flourishing letters stand in rows.—COWLEY.

As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire whether their

allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether they

compared the little to the great, or the great to the little.

Physic and chirurgery for a lover:

Gently, ah gently, madam, touch

The wound, which you yourself have made;

That pain must needs be very much

Which makes me of your hand afraid.

Cordials of pity give me now,

For I too weak of purgings grow.—COWLEY.

The world and a clock

Mahol th’ inferior world’s fantastic face

Through all the turns of matter’s maze did trace;

Great Nature’s well-set clock in pieces took;

On all the springs and smallest wheels did look

Of life and motion, and with equal art

Made up the whole again of every part.—COWLEY.

A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its

due honour, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun:

The moderate value of our guiltless ore

Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore;

Yet why should hallow’d vestal’s sacred shrine

Deserve more honour than a flaming mine?

These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be,

Than a few embers, for a deity.

Had he our pits, the Persian would admire

No sun, but warm’s devotion at our fire:

He’d leave the trotting whipster, and prefer

Our profound Vulcan ’bove that waggoner.

For wants he heat, or light? or would have store

Of both? ’tis here: and what can suns give more?

Nay, what’s the sun but, in a different name,

A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame?

Then let this truth reciprocally run,

The sun’s heaven’s coalery, and coals our sun.

Death, a voyage:

No family

E’er rigg’d a soul for Heaven’s discovery,

With whom more venturers might boldly dare

Venture their stakes with him in joy to share.—DONNE.

Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such as

no figures or licence can reconcile to the understanding.

A lover neither dead nor alive:

Then down I laid my head

Down on cold earth; and for a while was dead,

And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled.

Ah, sottish soul, said I,

When back to its cage again I saw it fly;

Fool to resume her broken chain,

And row her galley here again!

Fool, to that body to return

Where it condemned and destined is to burn!

Once dead, how can it be,

Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee,

That thou should’st come to live it o’er again in me?—COWLEY.

A lover’s heart, a hand grenado:

Woe to her stubborn heart, if once mine come

Into the self same room;

’Twill tear and blow up all within,

Like a grenade shot into a magazine.

Then shall Love keep the ashes and torn parts,

Of both our broken hearts;

Shalt out of both one new one make;

From hers th’ allay, from mine the metal take.—COWLEY.

The poetical propagation of light:

The prince’s favour is diffused o’er all,

From which all fortunes names, and natures fall:

Then from those wombs of stars, the Bride’s bright eyes,

At every glance a constellation flies,

And sows the court with stars, and doth prevent

In light and power, the all-ey’d firmament:

First her eye kindles other ladies’ eyes,

Then from their beams their jewels’ lustres rise;

And from their jewels torches do take fire,

And all is warmth, and light, and good desire.—DONNE.

They were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of

dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often

gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their

thoughts.

That a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality is by Cowley

thus expressed:

Thou in my fancy dost much higher stand

Than woman can be placed by Nature’s hand;

And I must needs, I’m sure, a loser be,

To change thee as thou’rt there, for very thee.

That prayer and labour should co-operate are thus taught by Donne:

In none but us are such mix’d engines found,

As hands of double office; for the ground

We till with them; and them to heaven we raise

Who prayerless labours, or, without this, prays,

Doth but one half, that’s none.

By the same author, a common topic, the danger of procrastination, is

thus illustrated:

That which I should have begun

In my youth’s morning, now late must be done;

And I, as giddy travellers must do,

Which stray or sleep all day, and having lost

Light and strength, dark and tired, must then ride post.

All that man has to do is to live and die; the sum of humanity is

comprehended by Donne in the following lines:

Think in how poor a prison thou didst lie

After enabled but to suck and cry.

Think, when ’twas grown to most, ’twas a poor inn,

A province pack’d up in two yards of skin,

And that usurp’d, or threaten’d with a rage

Of sicknesses or their true mother, age.

But think that death hath now enfranchised thee;

Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty;

Think, that a rusty piece discharged is flown

In pieces, and the bullet is his own,

And freely flies: this to thy soul allow,

Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatch’d but now.

They were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. Cowley thus apostrophises

beauty:

Thou tyrant which leav’st no man free!

Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be!

Thou murtherer, which has kill’d, and devil, which would’st damn me!

Thus he addresses his mistress:

Thou who, in many a propriety,

So truly art the sun to me,

Add one more likeness, which I’m sure you can,

And let me and my sun beget a man.

Thus he represents the meditations of a lover:

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been

So much as of original sin,

Such charms thy beauty wears, as might

Desires in dying confest saints excite.

Thou with strange adultery

Dost in each breast a brothel keep;

Awake all men do lust for thee,

And some enjoy thee when they sleep.

The true taste of tears:

Hither with crystal vials, lovers, come,

And take my tears, which are love’s wine,

And try your mistress’ tears at home;

For all are false, that taste not just like mine.—DONNE.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,

As that which from chas’d musk-cat’s pores doth trill,

As th’ almighty balm of th’ early east;

Such are the sweet drops of my mistress’ breast.

And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,

They seem no sweat drops, but pearl coronets:

Rank, sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles.—DONNE.

Their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend perhaps to be

pathetic:

As men in hell are from diseases free,

So from all other ills am I,

Free from their known formality:

But all pains eminently lie in thee.—COWLEY.

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which

they drew their illustrations were true; it was enough that they were

popular. Bacon remarks, that some falsehoods are continued by tradition,

because they supply commodious allusions.

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke:

In vain it something would have spoke;

The love within too strong for’t was,

Like poison put into a Venice-glass.—COWLEY.

In forming descriptions, they looked out not for images, but for

conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to

adorn. Dryden’s Night is well known; Donne’s is as follows:

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest:

Time’s dead low-water; when all minds divest

To-morrow’s business; when the labourers have

Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave,

Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this;

Now when the client, whose last hearing is

To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man,

Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them the

Again by death, although sad watch he keep;

Doth practise dying by a little sleep:

Thou at this midnight seest me.

It must be, however, confessed of these writers, that if they are upon

common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle; yet, where

scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and

acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon Hope shows

an unequalled fertility of invention:

Hops, whose weak being mind is,

Alike if it succeed and if it miss;

Whom good or ill does equally confound,

And both the horns of fate’s dilemma wound;

Vain shadow! which dust vanish quite,

Both at full noon and perfect night!

The stars have not a possibility

Of blessing thee;

If things then from their end we happy call

’Tis Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Hope, thou bold tester of delight,

Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour’st it quite!

Thou bring’st us an estate, yet leav’st us poor

By clogging it with legacies before!

The joys, which we entire should wed,

Come deflowr’d virgins to our bed;

Good fortunes without gain imported be,

Such mighty custom’s paid to thee:

For joy, like wine kept close, does better taste

If it take air before its spirits waste.

To the following comparison of a man that travels, and his wife that

stays at home, with a pair of compasses, it may be doubted whether

absurdity or ingenuity has the better claim:

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if th’ other do.

And, though it in the centre sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th’ other foot obliquely run.

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.—DONNE.

In all these examples it is apparent, that whatever is improper or

vicious, is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of

something new and strange; and that the writers fail to give delight, by

their desire of exciting admiration.

Having thus endeavoured to exhibit a general representation of the style

and sentiments of the metaphysical poets, it is now proper to examine

particularly the works of Cowley, who was almost the last of that race,

and undoubtedly the best.

His Miscellanies contain a collection of short compositions, written some

as they were dictated by a mind at leisure, and some as they were called

forth by different occasions; with great variety of style and sentiment,

from burlesque levity to awful grandeur. Such an assemblage of

diversified excellence no other poet has hitherto afforded. To choose

the best, among many good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of

criticism. I know not whether Scaliger himself has persuaded many

readers to join with him in his preference of the two favourite odes,

which he estimates in his raptures at the value of a kingdom. I will,

however, venture to recommend Cowley’s first piece, which ought to be

inscribed “To my Muse,” for want of which the second couplet is without

reference. When the title is added, there wills till remain a defect;

for every piece ought to contain in itself whatever is necessary to make

it intelligible. Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are

therefore epitaphs to be let, occupied indeed for the present, but hardly

appropriated.

The “Ode on Wit” is almost without a rival. It was about the time of

Cowley that _wit_, which had been till then used for _intellection_, in

contradistinction to _will_, took the meaning, whatever it be, which it

now bears.

Of all the passages in which poets have exemplified their own precepts,

none will easily be found of greater excellence than that in which Cowley

condemns exuberance of wit:—

Yet ’tis not to adorn and gild each part,

That shows more cost than art.

Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear;

Rather than all things wit, let none be there.

Several lights will not be seen,

If there be nothing else between.

Men doubt, because they stand so thick i’ th’ sky,

If those be stars which paint the galaxy.

In his verses to Lord Falkland, whom every man of his time was proud to

praise, there are, as there must be in all Cowley’s compositions, some

striking thoughts, but they are not well wrought. His “Elegy on Sir

Henry Wotton” is vigorous and happy; the series of thoughts is easy and

natural; and the conclusion, though a little weakened by the intrusion of

Alexander, is elegant and forcible.

It may be remarked, that in this elegy, and in most of his encomiastic

poems, he has forgotten or neglected to name his heroes.

In his poem on the death of Hervey, there is much praise, but little

passion; a very just and ample delineation of such virtues as a studious

privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence as a mind not yet called

forth to action can display. He knew how to distinguish, and how to

commend, the qualities of his companion; but, when he wishes to make us

weep, he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining how

his crown of bays, if he had it, would crackle in the fire. It is the

odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true. The bay-leaf

crackles remarkably as it burns; as therefore this property was not

assigned it by chance, the mind must be thought sufficiently at ease that

could attend to such minuteness of physiology. But the power of Cowley

is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the understanding.

The “Chronicle” is a composition unrivalled and alone: such gaiety of

fancy, such facility of expression, such varied similitude, such a

succession of images, and such a dance of words, it is in vain to expect

except from Cowley. His strength always appears in his agility; his

volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastic

mind. His levity never leaves his learning behind it; the moralist, the

politician, and the critic, mingle their influence even in this airy

frolic of genius. To such a performance Suckling could have brought the

gaiety, but not the knowledge; Dryden could have supplied the knowledge,

but not the gaiety.

The verses to Davenant, which are vigorously begun, and happily

concluded, contain some hints of criticism very justly conceived and

happily expressed. Cowley’s critical abilities have not been

sufficiently observed: the few decisions and remarks, which his prefaces

and his notes on the “Davideis” supply, were at that time accessions to

English literature, and show such skill as raises our wish for more

examples.

The lines from Jersey are a very curious and pleasing specimen of the

familiar descending to the burlesque.

His two metrical disquisitions _for_ and _against_ Reason are no mean

specimens of metaphysical poetry. The stanzas against knowledge produce

little conviction. In those which are intended to exalt the human

faculties, Reason has its proper task assigned it; that of judging, not

of things revealed, but of the reality of revelation. In the verses

_for_ Reason is a passage which Bentley, in the only English verses which

he is known to have written, seems to have copied, though with the

inferiority of an imitator.

The Holy Book like the eighth sphere doth shine

With thousand lights of truth divine,

So numberless the stars, that to our eye

It makes all but one galaxy.

Yet Reason must assist too; for, in seas

So vast and dangerous as these,

Our course by stars above we cannot know

Without the compass too below.

After this says Bentley:

Who travels in religious jars,

Truth mix’d with error, shade with rays

Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,

In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

Cowley seems to have had what Milton is believed to have wanted, the

skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has therefore

closed his Miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw, which apparently

excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are beauties

which common authors may justly think not only above their attainment,

but above their ambition.

To the Miscellanies succeed the Anacreontics, or paraphrastical

translations of some little poems, which pass, however justly, under the

name of Anacreon. Of those songs dedicated to festivity and gaiety, in

which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but the

enjoyment of the present day, he has given rather a pleasing than a

faithful representation, having retained their sprightliness, but lost

their simplicity. The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has

admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly

made more amiable to common readers, and perhaps, if they would honestly

declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those whom

courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned.

These little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any

other of Cowley’s works. The diction shows nothing of the mould of time,

and the sentiments are at no great distance from our present habitudes of

thought. Real mirth must always be natural, and nature is uniform. Men

have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the

same way.

Levity of thought naturally produces familiarity of language, and the

familiar part of language continues long the same; the dialogue of comedy

when it is transcribed from popular manners and real life, is read from

age to age with equal pleasure. The artifices of inversion by which the

established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new

words, or new meanings of words, are introduced, is practised, not by

those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.

The Anacreontics, therefore, of Cowley, give now all the pleasure which

they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more

than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar

and the festive.

The next class of his poems is called “The Mistress,” of which it is not

necessary to select any particular pieces for praise or censure. They

have all the same beauties and faults, and nearly in the same proportion.

They are written with exuberance of wit, and with copiousness of

learning; and it is truly asserted by Sprat, that the plenitude of the

writer’s knowledge flows in upon his page, so that the reader is commonly

surprised into some improvement. But, considered as the verses of a

lover, no man that has ever loved will much commend them. They are

neither courtly nor pathetic, have neither gallantry nor fondness. His

praises are too far sought, and too hyperbolical, either to express love,

or to excite it; every stanza is crowded with darts and flames, with

wounds and death, with mingled souls and with broken hearts.

The principal artifice by which “The Mistress” is filled with conceits is

very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other

poets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is true

of real fire is said of love, or figurative fire, the same word in the

same sentence retaining both significations. Thus “observing the cold

regard of his mistress’s eyes, and at the same time their power of

producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of ice.

Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he

concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree, on

which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up and

withered the tree.”

These conceits Addison calls mixed wit; that is, wit which consists of

thoughts true in one sense of the expression, and false in the other.

Addison’s representation is sufficiently indulgent: that confusion of

images may entertain for a moment; but being unnatural it soon grows

wearisome. Cowley delighted in it, as much as if he had invented it;

but, not to mention the ancients, he might have found it full-blown in

modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro:

Aspice quam variis distringar Lesbia curis!

Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:

Sum Nilus, sumque Ætna simul; restringite flammas

O lacrimæ, aut lacrimas ebibe flamma meas.

One of the severe theologians of that time censured him as having

published a book of profane and lascivious verses. From the charge of

profaneness, the constant tenor of his life, which seems to have been

eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which

discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the

accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his works will

sufficiently evince.

Cowley’s “Mistress” has no power of seduction: she “plays round the head,

but comes not at the heart.” Her beauty and absence, her kindness and

cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of

emotion. His poetical accounts of the virtues of plants, and colours of

flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions

are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire

by a philosophical rhymer who had only heard of another sex; for they

turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman but

as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and

sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always

condemn as unnatural.

The Pindaric Odes are now to be considered; a species of composition,

which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in his list of the lost

inventions of antiquity, and which he has made a bold and vigorous

attempt to recover.

The purpose with which he has paraphrased an Olympic and Nemæan Ode is by

himself sufficiently explained. His endeavour was, not to show precisely

what Pindar spoke, but his manner of speaking. He was therefore not at

all restrained to his expressions, nor much to his sentiments; nothing

was required of him, but not to write as Pindar would not have written.

Of the Olympic Ode the beginning is, I think, above the original in

elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connection is

supplied with great perspicuity; and the thoughts, which to a reader of

less skill seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any

abruption. Though the English ode cannot be called a translation, it may

be very properly consulted as a commentary.

The spirit of Pindar is indeed not everywhere equally preserved. The

following pretty lines are not such as his “deep mouth” was used to pour:

Great Rhea’s son,

If in Olympus’ top, where thou

Sitt’st to behold thy sacred show,

If in Alpheus’ silver flight,

If in my verse thou take delight,

My verse, great Rhea’s son, which is

Lofty as that and smooth as this.

In the Nemæan Ode, the reader must, in mere justice to Pindar, observe,

whatever is said of the original new moon, her tender forehead and her

horns, is superadded by his paraphrast, who has many other plays of words

and fancy unsuitable to the original, as,

The table, free for ev’ry guest,

No doubt will thee admit,

And feast more upon thee, than thou on it

He sometimes extends his author’s thoughts without improving them. In

the Olympionic an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends

three lines in swearing by the Castalian Stream. We are told of Theron’s

bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in

rhyming prose:

But in this thankless world the giver

Is envied even by the receiver;

’Tis now the cheap and frugal fashion

Rather to hide than own the obligation:

Nay, ’tis much worse than so;

It now an artifice does grow

Wrongs and injuries to do,

Lest men should think we owe.

It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit,

when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction,

could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.

In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he

sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindaric; and, if some deficiencies of

language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard

were to his contemporaries:

Begin the song, and strike the living lyre:

Lo how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire,

All hand in hand do decently advance,

And to my song with smooth and equal measure dance;

While the dance lasts, how long soe’er it be,

My music’s voice shall bear it company;

Till all gentle notes be drown’d

In the last trumpet’s dreadful sound.

After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude with

lines like these:

But stop, my Muse—

Hold thy Pindaric Pegasus closely in,

Which does to rage begin—

—’Tis an unruly and hard-mouth’d horse—

’Twill no unskilful touch endure,

But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.

The fault of Cowley, and perhaps of all the writers of the metaphysical

race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to their last ramifications, by

which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the greatest things the

parts are little; what is little can be but pretty, and by claiming

dignity becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of description is

destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration, and the force of metaphors is

lost, when the mind by the mention of particulars is turned more upon the

original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the

illustration is drawn than that to which it is applied.

Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode entitled the “Muse,”

who goes to “take the air” in an intellectual chariot, to which he

harnesses Fancy and Judgment, Wit and Eloquence, Memory and Invention;

how he distinguished Wit from Fancy, or how Memory could properly

contribute to Motion, he has not explained: we are however content to

suppose that he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the

Muse begin her career; but there is yet more to be done.

Let the _postillion_ Nature mount, and let

The _coachman_ Art be set;

And let the airy _footmen_, running all beside,

Make a long row of goodly pride;

Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences,

In a well-worded dress,

And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies,

In all their gaudy _liveries_.

Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I

cannot refuse myself the four next lines:

Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,

And bid it to put on;

For long though cheerful is the way,

And life, alas! allows but one ill winter’s day.

In the same ode, celebrating the power of the Muse, he gives her

prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching in

futurity; but, once having an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to show

us that he knows what an egg contains:

Thou into the close nests of Time dost peep,

And there with piercing eye

Through the firm shell and the thick white float spy

Years to come a-forming lie,

Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.

The same thought is more generally, and therefore more poetically

expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults of

Cowley:

Omnibus mundi Dominator horis

Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,

Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros

Crescit in annos.

Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind

of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require

still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red Sea “new dyes the

water’s name;” and England, during the Civil War, was “Albion no more,

nor to be named from white.” It is surely by some fascination not easily

surmounted, that a writer, professing to revive “the noblest and highest

writing in verse,” makes this address to the new year:

Nay, if thou lov’st me, gentle year,

Let not so much as love be there,

Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year,

Although I fear

There’s of this caution little need,

Yet, gentle year, take heed

How thou dost make

Such a mistake;

Such love I mean alone

As by thy cruel predecessors has been shown:

For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,

I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.

The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior—

Ye critics, say,

How poor to this was Pindar’s style!

Even those who cannot perhaps find in the Isthmian or Nemæan songs what

Antiquity what disposed them to expect, will at least see that they are

ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine that, if this

be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.

To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley’s sentiments must be added

the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of

using in any place a verse of any length, from two syllables to twelve.

The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very little harmony to a

modern ear; yet by examining the syllables we perceive them to be

regular, and have reason enough for supposing that the ancient audiences

were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought therefore to have

adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have

preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied

smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.

It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the “irregularity of numbers is the very

thing” which makes “that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects.”

But he should have remembered, that what is fit for everything can fit

nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure

of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice is

regulated, and the memory relieved.

If the Pindaric style be, what Cowley thinks it, “the highest and noblest

kind of writing in verse,” it can be adapted only to high and noble

subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critic,

or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse

which, according to Sprat, “is chiefly to be preferred for its near

affinity to prose.”

This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of

the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately

overspread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the

pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like

Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, and disorder tried to

break into the Latin: a poem on the Sheldonian Theatre, in which all

kinds of verse are shaken together, is unhappily inserted in the “Musæ

Anglicanæ.” Pindarism prevailed about half a century; but at last died

gradually away, and other imitations supply its place.

The Pindaric Odes have so long enjoyed the highest degree of poetical

reputation, that I am not willing to dismiss them with unabated censure;

and surely though the mode of their composition be erroneous, yet many

parts deserve at least that admiration which is due to great

comprehension of knowledge, and great fertility of fancy. The thoughts

are often new, and often striking; but the greatness of one part is

disgraced by the littleness of another; and total negligence of language

gives the noblest conceptions the appearance of a fabric august in the

plan, but mean in the materials. Yet surely those verses are not without

a just claim to praise; of which it may be said with truth, that no man

but Cowley could have written them.

The “Davideis” now remains to be considered; a poem which the author

designed to have extended to twelve books, merely, as he makes no scruple

of declaring, because the “Æneid” had that number; but he had leisure or

perseverance only to write the third part. Epic poems have been left

unfinished by Virgil, Statius, Spenser, and Cowley. That we have not the

whole “Davideis” is, however, not much to be regretted; for in this

undertaking Cowley is, tacitly at least, confessed to have miscarried.

There are not many examples of so great a work produced by an author

generally read, and generally praised, that has crept through a century

with so little regard. Whatever is said of Cowley, is meant of his other

works. Of the “Davideis” no mention is made; it never appears in books,

nor emerges in conversation. By the “Spectator” it has been once quoted;

by Rymer it has once been praised; and by Dryden, in “Mac Flecknoe,” it

has once been imitated; nor do I recollect much other notice from its

publication till now in the whole succession of English literature.

Of this silence and neglect, if the reason be inquired, it will be found

partly in the choice of the subject, and partly in the performance of the

work.

Sacred history has been always read with submissive reverence, and an

imagination overawed and controlled. We have been accustomed to

acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentic narrative, and

to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses

curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when

he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that

which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only

useless, but in some degree profane.

Such events as were produced by the visible interposition of Divine Power

are above the power of human genius to dignify. The miracle of creation,

however it may teem with images, is best described with little diffusion

of language: “He spake the word, and they were made.”

We are told that Saul “was troubled with an evil spirit;” from this

Cowley takes an opportunity of describing hell, and telling the history

of Lucifer, who was, he says,

Once general of a gilded host of sprites,

Like Hesper leading forth the spangled nights;

But down like lightning, which him struck, he came

And roar’d at his first plunge into the flame.

Lucifer makes a speech to the inferior agents of mischief, in which there

is something of heathenism, and therefore of impropriety; and, to give

efficacy to his words, concludes by lashing his breast with his long

tail: Envy, after a pause, steps out, and among other declarations of her

zeal utters these lines:

Do thou but threat, loud storms shall make reply,

And thunder echo to the trembling sky;

Whilst raging seas swell to so bold an height,

As shall the fire’s proud element affright,

Th’ old drudging sun, from his long-beaten way,

Shall at thy voice start, and misguide the day.

The jocund orbs shall break their measured pace,

And stubborn poles change their allotted place.

Heaven’s gilded troops shall flutter here and there,

Leaving their boasting songs tuned to a sphere.

Every reader feels himself weary with this useless talk of an allegorical

being.

It is not only when the events are confessedly miraculous, that fancy and

fiction lose their effect; the whole system of life, while the theocracy

was yet visible, has an appearance so different from all other scenes of

human action, that the reader of the sacred volume habitually considers

it as the peculiar mode of existence of a distinct species of mankind,

that lived and acted with manners uncommunicable; so that it is difficult

even for imagination to place us in the state of them whose story is

related, and by consequence their joys and griefs are not easily adopted,

nor can the attention be often interested in anything that befalls them.

To the subject thus originally indisposed to the reception of poetical

embellishments, the writer brought little that could reconcile

impatience, or attract curiosity. Nothing can be more disgusting than a

narrative spangled with conceits; and conceits are all that the

“Davideis” supplies.

One of the great sources of poetical delight is description, or the power

of presenting pictures to the mind. Cowley gives inferences instead of

images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen, but what

thoughts the sight might have suggested. When Virgil describes the stone

which Turnus lifted against Æneas, he fixes the attention on its bulk and

weight:

Saxum circumspicit ingens,

Saxum antiquum, ingens, campo quod forte jacebat

Limes agro positus, litem ut discerneret arvis.

Cowley says of the stone with which Cain slew his brother,

I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant

At once his murther and his monument.

Of the sword taken from Goliath, he says,

A sword so great, that it was only fit

To cut off his great head that came with it.

Other poets describe Death by some of its common appearances. Cowley

says, with a learned allusion to sepulchral lamps real or fabulous,

’Twixt his right ribs deep pierced the furious blade,

And open’d wide those secret vessels where

Life’s light goes out, when first they let in air.

But he has allusions vulgar as well as learned in a visionary succession

of kings:

Joas at first does bright and glorious show,

In life’s fresh morn his fame does early crow.

Describing an undisciplined army, after having said with elegance,

His forces seem’d no army, but a crowd

Heartless, unarm’d, disorderly, and loud,

he gives them a fit of the ague.

The allusions, however, are not always to vulgar things; he offends by

exaggeration as much as by diminution:

The king was placed alone, and o’er his head

A well-wrought heaven of silk and gold was spread.

Whatever he writes is always polluted with some conceit:

Where the sun’s fruitful beams give metals birth,

Where he the growth of fatal gold does see,

Gold, which alone more influence has than he.

In one passage he starts a sudden question to the confusion of

philosophy:

Ye learned heads, whom ivy garlands grace,

Why does that twining plant the oak embrace;

The oak for courtship most of all unfit,

And rough as are the winds that fight with it?

His expressions have sometimes a degree of meanness that surpasses

expectation:

Nay, gentle guests, he cries, since now you’re in,

The story of your gallant friend begin.

In a simile descriptive of the morning:

As glimmering stars just at th’ approach of day,

Cashier’d by troops, at last all drop away.

The dress of Gabriel deserves attention:

He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,

That e’er the mid-day sun pierced through with light;

Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spread,

Wash’d from the morning beauties’ deepest red:

An harmless flatt’ring meteor shone for hair,

And fell adown his shoulders with loose care;

He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies,

Where the most sprightly azure pleased the eyes;

This he with starry vapours sprinkles all,

Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall;

Of a new rainbow ere it fret or fade,

The choicest piece cut out, a scarf is made.

This is a just specimen of Cowley’s imagery; what might in general

expressions be great and forcible, he weakens and makes ridiculous by

branching it into small parts. That Gabriel was invested with the

softest or brightest colours of the sky, we might have been told, and

been dismissed to improve the idea in our different proportions of

conception; but Cowley could not let us go till he had related where

Gabriel got first his skin, and then his mantle, then his lace, and then

his scarf, and related it in the terms of the mercer and tailor.

Sometimes he indulges himself in a digression, always conceived with his

natural exuberance, and commonly, even where it is not long, continued

till it is tedious:

I’ th’ library a few choice authors stood,

Yet ’twas well stored, for that small store was good;

Writing, man’s spiritual physic, was not then

Itself, as now, grown a disease of men.

Learning (young virgin) but few suitors knew;

The common prostitute she lately grew,

And with the spurious brood loads now the press;

Laborious effects of idleness.

As the “Davideis” affords only four books, though intended to consist of

twelve, there is no opportunity for such criticism as Epic poems commonly

supply. The plan of the whole work is very imperfectly shown by the

third part. The duration of an unfinished action cannot be known. Of

characters either not yet introduced, or shown but upon few occasions,

the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The

fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the “Odyssey” than the

“Iliad;” and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the

skill of a man acquainted with the beet models. The past is recalled by

narration, and the future anticipated by vision: but he has been so

lavish of his poetical art, that it is difficult to imagine how he could

fill eight books more without practising again the same modes of

disposing his matter; and perhaps the perception of this growing

incumbrance inclined him to stop. By this abruption, posterity lost more

instruction than delight. If the continuation of the “Davideis” can be

missed, it is for the learning that had been diffused over it, and the

notes in which it had been explained.

Had not his characters been depraved like every other part by improper

decorations, they would have deserved uncommon praise. He gives Saul

both the body and mind of a hero:

His way once chose, he forward threat outright.

Nor turned aside for danger or delight.

And the different beauties of the lofty Merah and the gentle Michal are

very justly conceived and strongly painted.

Rymer has declared the “Davideis” superior to the “Jerusalem” of Tasso,

“which,” says he, “the poet, with all his care, has not totally purged

from pedantry.” If by pedantry is meant that minute knowledge which is

derived from particular sciences and studies, in opposition to the

general notions supplied by a wide survey of life and nature, Cowley

certainly errs, by introducing pedantry, far more frequently than Tasso.

I know not, indeed, why they should be compared; for the resemblance of

Cowley’s work to Tasso’s is only that they both exhibit the agency of

celestial and infernal spirits, in which, however, they differ widely;

for Cowley supposes them commonly to operate upon the mind by suggestion;

Tasso represents them as promoting or obstructing events by external

agency.

Of particular passages that can be properly compared, I remember only the

description of Heaven, in which the different manner of the two writers

is sufficiently discernible. Cowley’s is scarcely description, unless it

be possible to describe by negatives; for he tells us only what there is

not in heaven. Tasso endeavours to represent the splendours and

pleasures of the regions of happiness. Tasso affords images, and Cowley

sentiments. It happens, however, that Tasso’s description affords some

reason for Rymer’s censure. He says of the Supreme Being:

Hà sotto i piedi e fato e la natura

Ministri humili, e’l moto, e ch’il misura.

The second line has in it more of pedantry than perhaps can be found in

any other stanza of the poem.

In the perusal of the “Davideis,” as of all Cowley’s works, we find wit

and learning unprofitably squandered. Attention has no relief; the

affections are never moved; we are sometimes surprised, but never

delighted; and find much to admire, but little to approve. Still,

however, it is the work of Cowley, of a mind capacious by nature, and

replenished by study.

In the general review of Cowley’s poetry it will be found that he wrote

with abundant fertility, but negligent or unskilful selection; with much

thought, but with little imagery; that he is never pathetic, and rarely

sublime; but always either ingenious or learned, either acute or

profound.

It is said by Denham in his elegy,

To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he writ was all his own.

This wide position requires less limitation, when it is affirmed of

Cowley, than perhaps of any other poet.—He read much, and yet borrowed

little.

His character of writing was indeed not his own; he unhappily adopted

that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to present praise; and,

not sufficiently inquiring by what means the ancients have continued to

delight through all the changes of human manners, he contented himself

with a deciduous laurel, of which the verdure in its spring was bright

and gay, but which time has been continually stealing from his brows.

He was in his own time considered as of unrivalled excellence. Clarendon

represents him as having taken a flight beyond all that went before him;

and Milton is said to have declared that the three greatest English poets

were Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley.

His manner he had in common with others; but his sentiments were his own.

Upon every subject he thought for himself; and such was his copiousness

of knowledge, that something at once remote and applicable rushed into

his mind; yet it is not likely that he always rejected a commodious idea

merely because another had used it: his known wealth was so great that be

might have borrowed without loss of credit, in his elegy on Sir Henry

Wotton, the last lines have such resemblance to the noble epigram of

Grotius on the death of Scaliger, that I cannot but think them copied

from it, though they are copied by no servile hand.

One passage in his “Mistress” is so apparently borrowed from Donne, that

he probably would not have written it had it not mingled with his own

thoughts, so as that he did not perceive himself taking it from another:

Although I think thou never found wilt be,

Yet I’m resolved to search for thee;

The search itself rewards the pains.

So, though the chymic his great secret miss

(For neither it in Art or Nature is),

Yet things well worth his toil he gains:

And does his charge and labour pay

With good unsought experiments by the way.—COWLEY.

Some that have deeper digg’d Love’s mine than I,

Say, where his centric happiness doth lie:

I have loved, and got, and told;

But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,

I should not find that hidden mystery;

Oh, ’tis imposture all!

And as no chymic yet th’ elixir got,

But glorifies his pregnant pot,

If by the way to him befal

Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

So lovers dream a rich and long delight,

But get a winter-seeming summer’s night.

Jonson and Donne, as Dr. Hurd remarks, were then in the highest esteem.

It is related by Clarendon, that Cowley always acknowledged his

obligation to the learning and industry of Jonson: but I have found no

traces of Jonson in his works: to emulate Donne appears to have been his

purpose.; and from Donne ~he may have learnt that familiarity with

religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things, by which

readers far short of sanctity are frequently offended; and which would

not be borne in the present age, when devotion, perhaps not more fervent,

is more delicate.

Having produced one passage taken by Cowley from Donne, I will recompense

him by another which Milton seems to have borrowed from him. He says of

Goliath:

His spear, the trunk was of a lofty tree,

Which Nature meant some tall ship’s mast should be.

Milton of Satan:

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine

Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great ammiral, were but a wand,

He walked with.

His diction was in his own time censured as negligent. He seems not to

have known, or not to have considered, that words being arbitrary must

owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only,

which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought; and as

the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and obscured

by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rustics or mechanics;

so the most heroic sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most

splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words

used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths,

and contaminated by inelegant applications.

Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an

intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual gold

which defies destruction; but gold may be so concealed in baser matter,

that only a chemist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in unrefined

and plebeian words, that none but philosophers can distinguish it; and

both may be so buried in impurities, as not to pay the cost of their

extraction.

The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, first presents itself to

the intellectual eye; and if the first appearance offends, a further

knowledge is not often sought. Whatever professes to benefit by

pleasing, must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something

sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. What is

perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with the consciousness of

improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure.

Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without

care. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase:

he has no elegance either lucky or elaborate; as his endeavours were

rather to impress sentences upon the understanding, than images on the

fancy: he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar

propriety of nice adaptation.

It seems to follow from the necessity of the subject, rather than the

care of the writer, that the diction of his heroic poem is less familiar

than that of his slightest writings. He has given not the same numbers,

but the same diction, to the gentle Anacreon and the tempestuous Pindar.

His versification seems to have had very little of his care; and if what

he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmusical only when they are

ill-read, the art of reading them is at present lost; for they are

commonly harsh to modern ears. He has indeed many noble lines, such as

the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts

sometimes swelled his verse to unexpected and inevitable grandeur; but

his excellence of this kind is merely fortuitous: he sinks willingly down

to his general carelessness, and avoids with very little care either

meanness or asperity.

His contractions are often rugged and harsh:

One flings a mountain, and its rivers too

Torn up with ’t.

His rhymes are very often made by pronouns, or particles, or the like

unimportant words, which disappoint the ear, and destroy the energy of

the line.

His combination of different measures is sometimes dissonant and

unpleasing; he joins verses together, of which the former does not slide

easily into the latter.

The words “do” and “did,” which so much degrade in present estimation the

line that admits them, were in the time of Cowley little censured or

avoided; how often he used them, and with how bad an effect, at least to

our ears, will appear by a passage, in which every reader will lament to

see just and noble thoughts defrauded of their praise by inelegance of

language:

Where honour or where conscience _does_ not bind

No other law shall shackle me;

Slave to myself I ne’er will be;

Nor shall my future actions be confined

By my own present mind.

Who by resolves and vows engaged _does_ stand

For days, that yet belong to fate,

_Does_ like an unthrift mortgage his estate,

Before it falls into his hand;

The bondman of the cloister so,

All that he _does_ receive _does_ always owe.

And still as Time comes in, it goes away,

Not to enjoy, but debts to pay!

Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell!

Which his hour’s work as well as hours _does_ tell:

Unhappy till the last, the kind releasing knell.

His heroic lines are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are

sometimes sweet and sonorous.

He says of the Messiah,

Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound,

_And reach to worlds that must not yet be found_.

In another place, of David,

Yet bid him go securely, when he sends;

’_Tis Saul that is his foe_, _and we his friends_.

_The man who has his God_, _no aid can lack_;

_And we who bid him go_, _will bring him back_.

Yet amidst his negligence he sometimes attempted an improved and

scientific versification; of which it will be best to give his own

account subjoined to this line:

Nor can the glory contain itself in th’ endless space.

“I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of

readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose,

long, and, as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature

of the thing which it describes, which I would have observed in

divers other places of this poem, that else will pass as very

careless verses: as before,

_And over-runs the neighb’ring fields with violent course_.

“In the second book:

_Down a precipice deep_, _dowse he casts them all_—

“And,

_And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care_.

“In the third,

_Brass was his helmet_, _his boots brass_, _and o’er_

_His breast a thick plate strong brass he wore_.

“In the fourth,

_Like some fair pine o’er-looking all the ignobler wood_.

“And,

_Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong_.

“And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is,

that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that,

out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be

represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind

themselves to; neither have our English poets observed it, for aught

I can find. The Latins (_qui musas colunt severiores_) sometimes did

it; and their prince, Virgil, always: in whom the examples are

innumerable, and taken notice of by all judicious men, so that it is

superfluous to collect them.”

I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the

representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only

sound and motion. A “boundless” verse, a “headlong” verse, and a verse

of “brass” or of “strong brass,” seem to comprise very incongruous and

unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line

expressing “loose care,” I cannot discover; nor why the “pine” is

“taller” in an Alexandrine than in ten syllables.

But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of

representative versification, which perhaps no other English line can

equal:

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise:

He, who defers this work from day to day,

Does on a river’s bank expecting stay

Till the whole stream that stopp’d him shall be gone,

_Which runs_, _and_, _as it runs_, _for ever shall run on_.

Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at

pleasure with the common heroic of ten syllables, and from him Dryden

borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered

the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestic, and has therefore

deviated into that measure when he supposes the voice heard of the

Supreme Being.

The author of the “Davideis” is commended by Dryden for having written it

in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an

heroic poem; but this seems to have been known before by May and Sandys,

the translators of the “Pharsalia” and the “Metamorphoses.”

In the “Davideis” are some hemistichs, or verses left imperfect by the

author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended to

complete them; that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably concluded,

because this truncation is imitated by no subsequent Roman poet; because

Virgil himself filled up one broken line in the heat of recitation;

because in one the sense is now unfinished; and because all that can be

done by a broken verse, a line intersected by a _cœsura_, and a full

stop, will equally effect.

Of triplets in his “Davideis” he makes no use, and perhaps did not at

first think them allowable; but he appears afterwards to have changed his

mind, for in the verses on the government of Cromwell he inserts them

liberally with great happiness.

After so much criticism on his poems, the essays which accompany them

must not be forgotten. What is said by Sprat of his conversation, that

no man could draw from it any suspicion of his excellence in poetry, may

be applied to these compositions. No author ever kept his verse and his

prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural,

and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet

obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought, or hard-laboured;

but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.

It has been observed by Felton, in his Essay on the Classics, that Cowley

was beloved by every Muse that he courted; and that he has rivalled the

ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy.

It may be affirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he brought to

his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are

embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was

the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater

ode, and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for

sprightly sallies, and for lofty flights; that he was among those who

freed translation from servility, and, instead of following his author at

a distance, walked by his side; and that, if he left versification yet

improvable, he left likewise from time to time such specimens of

excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.