From whence these take their birth which now are few lines so many remote ideas could be brought

In none but us are such mix'd engines founa,
As hands of double office; for the ground

COWLEY.

We till with them; and them to heaven we raise ;
Who prayerless labours, or, without this, prays,
Doth but one half, that's none.

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for conceits. Night has been a

By the same author a comon topic, the danger common subject, which poets have contended 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.

the
All that man has to do is to live and die ;
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 enfranchis'd thee;
Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty;
Think, that a rusty piece discharg'd 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 disgust-
ing. Cowley thus apostrophises beauty:

-Thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free!
Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be!
Thou murtherer, which hast kill'd; and devil, which
wouldst 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 my 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.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,

Donne.

As that which from chafd musk-cats' pores doth thrill,

As the almighty balm of the 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 ;

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, may shut them then
Again by death, although sad watch he keep,
Doth practice dying by a little sleep;
Thou at this midnight seest me.

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

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd 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 dost 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 taster of delight,

Who, whilst thou should'st but taste, devour'st it,
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 deflower'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 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 harkens 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

His Miscellanies contain a collection of short | pression, such varied similitude, such a succescompositions, written, some as they were dictat- sion of images, and such a dance of words, it is ed by a mind at leisure, and some as they were in vain to expect except from Cowley. called forth by different occasions, with great strength always appears in his agility; his volavariety of style and sentiment, from burlesque tility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound levity to awful grandeur. Such an assemblage of an elastic mind. His levity never leaves his of diversified excellence no other poet has hither-learning behind it; the moralist, the politician, to afforded. To choose the best, among many and the critic, mingle their influence even in this good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of airy frolic of genius. To such a performance, criticism. I know not whether Scaliger himself Suckling could have brought the gayety but not has persuaded many readers to join with him in the knowledge: Dryden could have supplied his preference of the two favourite odes, which the knowledge, but not the gayety. he estimates in his raptures at the value of a The verses to Davenant, which are vigorouskingdom. I will, however, venture to recom-ly begun, and happily concluded, contain some mend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be in-hints of criticism very justly conceived and hapscribed "To my Muse," for want of which the pily expressed. Cowley's critical abilities have second couplet is without reference. When the not been sufficiently observed; the few decisions title is added, there will still remain a defect; and remarks, which his prefaces and his notes for every piece ought to contain in itself what- on the Davideis supply, were at that time accesever is necessary to make it intelligible. Pope sions to English literature, and show such skill has some epitaphs without names; which are as raises our wish for more examples. 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' the 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.

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

It may be remarked, that in this Elegy, and in most of his encomiastic poems, he has forgot-lieved to have wanted, the skill to rate his own ten or neglected to name his heroes.

performances by their just value, and has thereIn his poem on the death of Hervey, there is fore closed his Miscellanies with the verses upon much praise, but little passion; a very just and Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have ample delineation of such virtues as a studious gone before them, and in which there are beauties privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence which common authors may justly think not as a mind not yet called forth to action can dis-only above their attainment, but above their play. He knew how to distinguish, and how to ambition. commend, the qualities of his companions; 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 gayety of fancy, such facility of ex

To the Miscellanies succeed the Anacreontiques, or paraphrastical translations of some little poems, which pass, however unjustly, under the same name of Anacreon. Of these songs dedicated to festivity and gayety, 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 more amiable to common

*Dodsley's Collection of Poems, vol. v.-R.

readers, and perhaps, if they would honestly de- | tion the ancients, he might have found it fullclare their own perceptions, to far the greater blown in modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro:

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 dis-sured him as having published a book of profane tance 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 produced 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 meanings of words are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.

The Anacreontiques 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 in 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, for 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 men

Aspice quam variis distringar Lesbia curis ! Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor: Sum Nilus, sumque Eina simul; restringite flammas O lacrimæ, aut lacrimas ebibe flamma meas. One of the severe theologians of that time cenand 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 discovers no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will sufficiently

evince.

she "plays round the head, but reaches not the
Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction;
heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness
and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce
His poetical
no correspondence of emotion.
account of the virtues of plants, and colours of
flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigi-
dity. 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 con-

demn as unnatural.

The Pindarique Odes are now to be considered; a species of composition, which Cowley thinks Panciolus 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 connexion is supplied with great perspicuity; and thoughts, which to a reader of less skill seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any abruption. Though the English mode cannot be called a translation, it may be very properly consulted as a commentary.

The spirit of Pindar is indeed not every where 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 Nemean ode the reader must, in mere
of the original new moon, her tender forehead and
justice to Pindar, observe, that whatever is said
her horns, is superadded by his paraphrast, who
suitable to the original: as,
has many other plays of words and fancy un-

The table, free for ev'ry guest,
No doubt will thee admit,

And feast more upon thee. than thou on it.