Whatever God did say

Is all thy plan and smooth uninterrupted way.
Nay, even beyond his works thy voyages are known,
Thou 'st thousand worlds too of thine own.

Thou peak'st, Great Queen, in the same style as he,

And a new world leaps forth when thou say'st, Let it be!'

The very apparatus of notes with which it was permissible to issue the Odes enlarged the poet's opportunities. In the Praise of Pindar, for example, we have

So Pindar does new words and figures roll
Down his impetuous dithyrambic tide.

Which in no channel deigns to abide,

Which neit er banks nor dikes control;"

on which the note is, 'Banks, natural; Dikes, artificial. It will neither be bounded nor circumscribed by nature nor by art.' With such a means of interpretation at hand, what limit need the poet set on his invention ?

And yet, when the subject is one that interests him, Cowley has something to say that we should not wish unsaid or said differently. Sonorousness counts for something, after all, in the treatment of such themes as the future of knowledge or the fate of a hero and a cause. The two odes which we have chosen for quotation-that To Mr. Hobbes and that called Brutus-are rightly grandiose, and are therefore successful. Like the other leading spirits of his age, Cowley looked across the passing troubles of the day to the new world to which Bacon had pointed, and which Bacon's followers were hastening to occupy; and of this feeling the Ode to Mr. Hobbes is the best expression. Again, the dominant fact in contemporary history (the Odes were published in 1656) was the success of the new Cæsar, Cromwell. Conscientious royalists like Cowley, such at least as were men of contemplation not of action, threw themselves back on history and philosophy, and if they could not explain the evil they paralleled it with other evils from which good had seemed to flow. Brutus, the slayer of Cæsar, the avenger of his country's murder, is himself slain; but what then? Virtue is for all that not an idol or a name :

Hold, noble B utus, and restrain

The bold voice of thy generous disdain.

These mighty gulfs are yet

Too deep for all thy judgment and thy wit.'

The two odes are brilliant examples of what Cowley could do when he left what he was conventionally expected to feel for what he really felt.

About the Davideis, the epic of whose twelve books fortunately only four came to the birth, perhaps the less said the better. We do not altogether wish it away, on account of the vigorous pages which it inspired in the preface; the pages which contain Cowley's eloquent and almost Miltonic plea for sacred poetry :

It is not without grief and indignation that I behold that divine science employing all her inexhaustible riches of wit and eloquence, either in the wicked and beggarly flattery of great persons, or the unmanly idolizing of foolish women, or the wretched affectation of scurril laughter, or at best on the confused antiquated dreams of senseless fables and metamorphoses. Amongst all holy and consecrated things which the devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the d. ity; as altars, temples, sacrifices, prayers, and the like; there is none that he so universally, and so long usurped as poetry It is time to recover it out of the tyrant's hands, and to restore it to the kingdom of God who is the Father of it. It is time to baptize it in Jordan, for it will never become clean by bathing in the water of Dama cus.'

But if we ask how Cowley realised his aspirations, how he succeeded in 'elevating poesy' rather than 'abasing divinity,' the answer must be disappointing. The Davideis is a school exercise, no more. It is at least no injustice to take as a specimen the most famous of the descriptive passages, the picture of Hell :

VOL. II.

Beneath the silent chambers of the earth,

Where the sun's fruitful beams give metals birth,
Where he the g owth of fatal gold doth see,
Gold which above more influence has than he;
Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie,
And infant winds their tender voices try;
Beneath the mighty ocean's wealthy caves,
Beneath th' eternal fountain of all waves,
Where their vast court the n other-waters keep,
And undisturb'd by moons in silence skep;
There is a place deep wondrous deep below,
Which genuine night and horror does o'erflow:
No bound controls th' unwearied space, but he'l
Endless as those dire pains that in it dwell.
Here no dear glimpse of the sun's lovely face
Strikes through the solid darkness of the place;

R

No dawning morn does her kind reds display;

One slight weak leam would here be thought the day

No gentle stars with their fair gems of light

Offend the tyrannous and unquestion'd night.
Here Lucifer the mighty captive reigns,

Proud, 'midst his woes, and tyrant in his chains.'

We are driven in sheer despair to Milton :

'He views

The dismal situation waste and wild;

A dungeon horrible on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed: yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible,

Served only to discover sights of woe,

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades-'

Here are two nearly contemporary pictures: the one full of groom, profundity, terror, all coming directly from Milton's simple handling of simple elements. Fire and darkness-these are the physical materials of his hell, and they are left to produce their effect upon the reader by their own intensity and vastness, while the spiritual side of hell is presented in that ceaseless note of woe, 'Regions of sorrow, doleful shades.' In Milton, in effect, we have that 'union of simplicity with greatness' that marks the true epic. But Cowley's hell is shown to us as lying piled with imaginary cosmical lumber, under the caverns where metals are bred, under the nests of the callow crying tempests, under the court of the waters. He cannot take us to it except through a labyrinth of details, on each of which he would dwell for a moment, losing sight of the end. 'Infant winds,' 'tender voices,' 'the vast court of the mother waters,' the influence of gold, the cause of tides and tidelessness-what have these to do with hell, that is, with the deepest conception of dread and darkness which the mind can form? But it is a consolation to be able to believe that Cowley was dissatisfied with the Davideis, and that in his maturity he regarded it as merely indicating to others the poetical capabilities of the Bible history. I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect attempt of mine,' he says at the end of the preface, 'but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it throughly and successfully.' Eleven years after these words were written appeared Paradise Lost.

The subsequent editions of the folio contain other writings, both

verse and prose, that Cowley published in his later years, and some of the verse we give in our selections. There are no general features however by which we can distinguish these poems from the rest of his work: sometimes, as in the beautiful stanzas which we quote from the Hymn to Light, or in the verses which close the Essay on Solitude, or in the Ode on the Royal Society, he rises to his highest point; sometimes, as in what he wrote on the death of 'the matchless Orinda,' and in the poem on The Garden, he sinks to his lowest.

Addison's Essay1 and Johnson's Life have said the last word on Cowley's 'mixed wit,' 'metaphysics,' or 'conceits'; and we need hardly dwell at any greater length on what is the first, most obvious, and most disastrous quality of his muse. He owes to it his poetical effacement with posterity, as he owed to it his first success with his contemporaries; and it would be ungracious as well as uncritical to fasten our attention solely upon that canker of his style. He lived at the end of one intellectual epoch and at the beginning of another; he held of both, and he was marred by the vices of the decadence as much as, but no more than, he was glorified by the dawning splendours of the new age. What had been the extravagance of a young and uncontrolled imagination in Lyly and Sidney became the pedantry of ingenuity in the sane and learned Cowley, the master of two or three positive sciences and of all the literatures of Europe. But this pedantry was not all. 'I cannot conclude this head of mixed wit,' says Addison, 'without owning that the admirable poet out of whom I have taken the examples of it had as much true wit as any author that ever writ, and indeed all other talents of an extraordinary genius.' Not, perhaps, all other talents of an extraordinary genius, but knowledge, reflection, calmness and clearness of judgment; in a word, the gifts of the age of science and of prose which set in with the Restoration; and with these a rhetorical and moral fervour that made him a power in our literature greater, for the moment, than any that had gone before.

EDITOR.

1

Spectator, no. 62.

1.

A WISH.

[First printed in Poetical Blossomes, 2nd edition.]

This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honour I would have

Not from great deeds, but good alone.
The unknown are better than ill known;
Rumour can ope the grave.

Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturb'd as death, the night.
My house a cottage, more

Than palace, and should fitting be,

For all my use, not luxury.

My garden painted o'er

With nature's hand, not art's; and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine field.

Thus would I double my life's fading space,
For he that runs it well, twice runs his race.
And in this true delight,

These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear nor wish my fate,
But boldly say each night,

To-morrow let my sun his beams display,
Or in clouds hide them; I have liv'd to-day.