twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that
it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not
merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley’s; still
less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole,
which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any
which remain, from his _Elegy_; which led Milton to omit from the
Spirit’s _Prologue_ in _Comus_ sixteen glorious lines which may still be
seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in
the notes to later editions of his Poems.--l. 45-56: Johnson has said,
urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which
we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, ‘if
Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.’ Let Dryden
have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of
others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even
as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for
example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as
satisfying to the ear as to the mind.--l. 68: This line is certainly
perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined
it runs thus,
‘Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.’
In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed,
‘Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.’
The line seems in neither shape to yield any tolerable sense--not in the
first, with ‘Light’ regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so
pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second,
which only acquires some sort of meaning when ‘colours’ is treated as a
genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am so little satisfied
with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to
the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be
disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it.
P. 120, No. cvi.--Hallam has said that ‘Cowley upon the whole has had a
reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,’ adding,
however, that ‘some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.’ This may
have been so, but a man’s contemporaries have some opportunities of
judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not
only by what he _does_, but by what he _is_; and oftentimes a man _is_
more than he _does_; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come
in actual contact with him which is only inadequately justified by aught
which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many
a man’s embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some
men’s, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most
transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question
Mr. Hallam’s assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind
him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of
imagination, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past
history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the
conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so
highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham,
the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will
show:
‘Old mother Wit and Nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;
In Spenser and in Jonson Art
Of slower Nature got the start;
But both in him so equal are,
None knows which bears the happiest share.
To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he wrote was all his own,
He melted not the ancient gold,
Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold
To plunder all the Roman stores
Of poets and of orators.
Horace’s wit and Virgil’s state
He did not steal but emulate!
And when he would like them appear,
Their garb, but not their clothes did wear.’
l. 19-40: Compare with these the lines, inferior indeed, but themselves
remarkable, and showing how strongly Cowley felt on this matter, which
occur in his _Ode to Dr. Harvey_, the discoverer of the circulation of
the blood:
‘Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth’s own book,
The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,
And wisely thought ’twas fit
Not to read comments only upon it,
But on the original itself to look.
Methinks in art’s great circle others stand,
Locked up together, hand in hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
And dance like fairies a fantastic round,
But neither change their motion nor their ground.’
The same thought reappears, and again remarkably expressed, although
under quite different images, in his _Ode to Mr. Hobbs_. These are a few
lines:
‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,
Old rubbish we remove.
To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,
And with fond divining wands
We search among the dead
For treasure burièd,
Whilst still the liberal earth does hold
So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’
Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the
same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of
nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it:
‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite,
And made his torch their universal light.
So truth, while only one supplied the State,
Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;
Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms,
Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’
l. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first
prefixed to Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society of London_, London,
1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley’s
death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two
years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley’s statement here. The
position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise
the encomium on Sprat’s _History_ might seem dragged in with no
sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It
may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who
know Addison’s ‘tuneful prelate’ only by his verse might suppose. The
book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day
still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed
when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after l. 143,
three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by
a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They
are as follows:
‘She with much stranger art than his that put
All the Iliads in a nut,
The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’
P. 129, No. cix.--This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from the
_Thyestes_ of Seneca, beginning
Me dulcis saturet quies,
and ending with these remarkable lines,
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi,
seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the
seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale,
prefixed to one of his _Contemplations_, there is a translation by
Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the
concluding lines:
‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,
Into his own heart never pries,
Death’s to him a strange surprise.’
P. 130, No. cx.--I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of
which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (‘a most
profuse pourer forth of English rhyme’ Phillips calls him) was indeed so
intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or
bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and
sometimes showed that he possessed.
P. 131, No. cxii.--When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles ‘the
darling of our plebeian judgments,’ he intimates the circle in which his
popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt
into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been
hailed as
‘that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,’
became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The
reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some
specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his
admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far
better right than his despisers.--l. 25: ‘To vie’ is to put down a
certain sum upon a card; ‘to revie’ is to cover this with a larger, by
which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.
P. 132, No. cxiii.--Milton’s lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be
counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into
competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting
epitaph in the English language. Of Pope’s there is not one which
deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is
no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has
grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning
the departed besides those which are dealt with here.--This epitaph
contains two fine allusions to Virgil’s _Æneid_, with which Dryden was
of necessity so familiar. The first, that of l. 7-10 to book v. l.
327-338. At the games with which Æneas celebrates his father’s funeral,
Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the
foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first
at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines
there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. l.
860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young
Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family
and of the Roman people perished.
P. 133, No. cxiv.--Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of
Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, ‘by him who
says what he saw’--for this is the attestation to the truth of all that
it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness
of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.
P. 136, No. cxix.--The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out
in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West
passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering
on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the
hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these
sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris’s _Voyages_,
vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance
dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast
had arrived--but he shall speak his own words:--‘and now the sun was
set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we
assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning
upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though
perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my
young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion.’ To
me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.
P. 137, No. cxxi.--A few lines from this exquisite monody have found
their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole
poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in
Headley’s _Select Beauties_, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry
King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter
of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the
poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It
would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to
whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did
renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has
called _The Surrender_, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume.
Henry King’s _Poems_ have been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah,
London, 1843.
P. 141, No. cxxiii.--A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeed almost
all Donne’s poetry is imperfect in form and workmanship; but it is the
genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles,
wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all. There
is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual
life, which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that,
noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the language of Carew, one
of his contemporaries,
‘A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,’
he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great
Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same
tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same
conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then
the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of
Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered,
and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had
victoriously struggled.
P. 142, No. cxxv.--There is a certain residue of truth in Johnson’s
complaint of the blending of incongruous theologies, or rather of a
mythology and a theology, in this poem--Neptune and Phœbus and Panope
and the Fury mixed up with St. Peter and a greater than St. Peter, and a
fierce assault on the Clergy of the Church. At the same time there is a
fusing power in the imagination, when it is in its highest exercise,
which can bring together and chemically unite materials the most
heterogeneous; and the fault of Johnson’s criticism is that he has no
eye for the mighty force of this which in _Lycidas_ is displayed, and
which has brought all or nearly all of its strange assemblage of
materials into harmonious unity--and even where this is not so, hardly
allows us to remember the fact, so wondrous is the beauty and splendour
of the whole. But in weaker hands the bringing together of all which is
here brought together, and the attempt to combine it all in one poem,
would have inevitably issued in failure the most ridiculous.--l. 32-49:
This and more than one other allusion in this poem implies that King
wrote verses, and of an idyllic character, as would seem. In his
brother’s Elegy, contained in the same volume in which _Lycidas_ first
appeared, as much, and indeed a good deal more is said:
‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attire
That e’er they wore.’
If he wrote English verse, and it is difficult to give any other meaning
to these lines, none of it has reached us. A few pieces of Latin poetry
bearing his name are scattered through the volumes of encomiastic verse
which were issued from Cambridge during the time that he, as Fellow and
Tutor of Christ’s, was connected with it. They are only of average
merit.--l. 50: A glorious appropriation of Virgil, _Buc_. x. 9, 10,
‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ
Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’
l. 132: Observe the exquisite art with which Milton manages the
transition from the Christian to the heathen. He assumes that Alpheus
and the Sicilian Muse had shrunk away ashamed while St. Peter was
speaking. In bidding them now to return, he implies that he is coming
down from the spiritual heights to which for a while he had been lifted
up, and entering the region of pastoral poetry once more.--l. 159-164:
These lines were for a long time very obscure. Dr. Todd in his learned
notes, to which I must refer, has done much to dissipate the obscurity,
though I cannot think all is clear even now.
P. 148, No. cxxvi.--These lines are the short answer to a very long
question, or series of questions, which Davenant has called _The
Philosopher’s Disquisition directed to the dying Christian_. This poem,
than which I know few weightier with thought, unfortunately extends to
nearly four hundred lines--its length, and the fact that it appeals but
to a limited circle of readers, precluding me from finding room for more
than a brief extract from it, and that in this note; but it literally
abounds with lines notable as the following:
‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,
That wears out Truth’s best stories into tales.’
I am well aware of the evil report under which Davenant labours, and
there are passages in his poems which seem to bear it out, as for
example this, which appears to call into question the resurrection:
‘But ask not bodies doomed to die,
To what abode they go:
Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,
It is not safe to know.’
At the same time ‘the Philosopher’ here does not so much deny that
there is any truth for man as that he has any organ whereby, of himself,
he may attain this truth. The poem--it is the dying Christian who is
addressed--opens thus:
‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,
(For to increase your knowledge you must die)
Tell me if all that learning be not vain,
On which we proudly in this life rely.
Is not the learning which we knowledge call,
Our own but by opinion and in part?
Not made entirely certain, nor to all,
And is not knowledge but disputed art?
And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,
Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,
Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,
While we still follow, and still doubt our way;
A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,
Who guessingly her progress doth begin;
And brings us back where first she led us out,
To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.
It is a plummet to so short a line,
As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;
The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,
Nor far above the middle region rise.
This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,
Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;
She steals to nature’s closet, and from thence
Brings nought but undecyphered characters.
She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boast
Of adding to old maps; though she has bin
But sailing by some clear and open coast,
Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.
Of this forbidden fruit since we but gain
A taste, by which we only hungry grow,
We merely toil to find our studies vain,
And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’
P. 150, No. cxxviii.--This poem, apart from its proper beauty, which is
very considerable, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ
Wordsworth’s still higher strain, namely his _Ode on Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_. I do not mean that
Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his. The coincidences
are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them
accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the
way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, the _Silex Scintillans_
was altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an
explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought
for elsewhere. The complete forgetfulness into which poetry, which,
though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one,
may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as
possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions
of Vaughan’s poems. The first edition of the first part of the _Silex
Scintillans_ appeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847.
Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in his _Theatrum
Poetarum_, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by
his _Olor Iscanus_, a juvenile production, of comparatively little
worth; yet seeing that it yields such lines as the following--they form
part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, our
first James’ daughter--it cannot be affirmed to be of none:
Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;
A flower of purpose sprung to bow
To heedless tempests and the rage
Of an incensèd stormy age:
And yet as balm-trees gently spend
Their tears for those that do them rend,
Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,
But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’
As a divine Vaughan may be inferior, but as a poet he is certainly
superior, to Herbert, who never wrote anything so purely poetical as
_The Retreat_. Still Vaughan would probably never have written as he
has, if Herbert, whom he gratefully owns as his master, had not shown
him the way.
P. 154, No. cxxxii.--This poem, so little known, though the work of one
so well known, opens very solemnly and grandly, but does not maintain
itself altogether at the same height to the end. Even as I have given
it, the two concluding strophes are inferior to the others; and this
declension would be felt by the reader still more strongly, if I had not
at once lightened the poem, and brought it within reasonable compass, by
the omission of no less than six strophes which immediately precede
these. It bears date January 14, 1682/3; and was written at season of
great weakness and intense bodily suffering (see his _Life_ edited by
Sylvester, Part III. p. 192); but the actual life of the great
non-conformist divine was prolonged for some eight or nine years more.
P. 163, No. cxxxviii.--I have gladly found room in this volume, as often
as I fairly could, for poems written by those who, strictly speaking,
were not poets; or who, if poets, have only rarely penned their
inspiration, and, either wanting the accomplishment of verse, or not
caring to use it, have preferred to embody thoughts which might have
claimed a metrical garb in other than metrical forms. Poems from such
authors must always have a special interest for us. To the former of
these classes the author of these manly and high-hearted lines belongs,
and another whose epitaph on his companions left behind in the Arctic
regions is earlier given (see No. cxix.). Bacon (for who can deny to him
a poet’s gifts?) and, before all others as a poet in prose, Jeremy
Taylor, belong to the second. It would be more difficult to affirm of
Bishop Berkeley (see No. cxxxvii.), and of Sir Thomas Browne (see No.
cxxxi.), to which of these classes they ought to be assigned.
P. 166, No. cxxxix.--These lines, in their wit worthy of Lucian, and
with a moral purpose which oftentimes Lucian is wholly without, are
called A Fable, but manifestly have no right to the name. I have omitted
six lines, but with reluctance, being as in fact they are among the most
moral lines in the whole poem.
P. 169, No. cxli.--This is a party ballad, and, rightly to understand
it, we must understand the circumstances of which it assumes on our part
a knowledge. In 1727 Admiral Hosier blockaded Porto-Bello with twenty
ships; but was not allowed to attack it, war not having actually broken
out with Spain, and, a peace being patched up, his squadron was
withdrawn. In 1740 Admiral Vernon took Porto-Bello with six ships. It
was apparently a very creditable exploit; but Vernon being an enemy of
Walpole’s, and a member of the Opposition, it was glorified by them
beyond its merits. When they boasted that he with six ships had effected
what Hosier had not been allowed to attempt with twenty, the statement
was a perfectly true one, but in nothing dishonourable to him or to his
employers. Glover is here the mouthpiece of the Opposition, who, while
they exalted Vernon, affected to pity Hosier, who had died, as they
declared, of a broken heart; and of whose losses by disease during the
blockade they did not fail to make the most. It is a fine ballad, and
will do for Glover what his _Leonidas_ would altogether have failed to
do. This we may confidently affirm, whether we quite agree with Lord
Stanhope or not, that it is ‘the noblest song perhaps ever called forth
by any British victory, except Mr. Campbell’s _Battle of the Baltic_.’
P. 172, No. cxlii.--This poem was for a while supposed to be old, and an
old line has been worked up into it. This was probably the refrain of an
older as it is of the more modern poem, which has Miss Elliott,
(1727-1805), an accomplished lady of the Minto family, for its
author.--l. 1: ‘lilting,’ singing cheerfully.--l. 3: ‘loaning,’ broad
lane.--l. 5: ‘scorning,’ rallying.--l. 6: ‘dowie’ dreary.--l. 8:
‘leglin,’ milkpail.--l. 9: ‘shearing’ reaping.--l. 10: ‘bandsters,’
sheaf-binders.--‘lyart,’ inclining to gray.--‘runkled,’ wrinkled.--l.
11: ‘fleeching,’ coaxing.--l. 14: ‘bogle,’ ghost.