hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in rhyming prose: But in this thankless world the giver 'Tis now the cheap and frugal fashion 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 Pindarick; 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 wellfitted 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, 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 a hard-mouth'd horse 'T will 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 the 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 intituled The Muse, who goes to take the air in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses Fancy and Judgement, 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 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, 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 having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to shew 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 dost spy 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 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 waters' 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, 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 shewn ; The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior Ye critics, say, How poor to this was Pindar's style! |