The better to secure the fate
And lasting empire of a state,

The false are numerous, and the true,
That only have the right, are few.

Hence fools that understand them least

Are still the fiercest in contést.

Far greater numbers have been lost by hopes
Than all the magazines of daggers, ropes,
And other ammunitions of despair,
Were ever able to despatch by fear.

In Rome no temple was so low
As that of Honour, built to show
How humble honour ought to be,
Though there 'twas all authority.

Some people's fortunes, like a weft or stray,
Are only gained by losing of their way.

COWLEY.

(1608-1674.)

In the period of his reputation, Cowley, as well as Butler, precedes Milton: he died in the year of the publication of Paradise Lost. He was the son of a grocer in London. The death of his father before his birth, entailed on his mother a struggle to procure him a classical education. He was ultimately enabled to enter the university of Cambridge. The perusal of Spencer's Fairy Queen in his childhood, he says himself, made him irrecoverably a poet. At the age of fifteen he published a volume of pieces, containing " Pyramus and Thisbe," written when he was ten years old, and "Constantia and Philetus," composed two years afterwards; both are productions of miraculous precocity. After the commencement of the civil war, he was ejected from Cambridge by the Parliamentary visiters: he sheltered himself amid the loyalty of Oxford. On the surrender of that city to the Parliament, he joined the court of the exiled queen in France, and was for several years employed as a confidential secretary, and in the execution of his office had the important and laborious duty of decyphering the correspondence of that princess with her husband and his party in England. Cowley returned to England in 1656, with the view, it has been said, of rendering himself useful to the exiled king: he was discovered and seized, but was ultimately released. He assumed the apparent profession of a physician, and procured from the university of Oxford the degree of M. D. This circumstance gave rise to his Latin work on Plants, in six books, partly in elegiac, partly in heroic verse.

At the Restoration, Cowley found himself, like many others whose services and sacrifices for the king had been great, neglected and unrewarded. Ultimately, however, by the kindness of powerful friends, he obtained a favourable lease of some of the queen's lands, and had before him the prospect of retirement, which he ardently desired, and of a competence equal to his un

ambitious wants. His solitude appears not to have yielded him the satisfaction he expected. He died at his house in Chertsey, in 1667, of a disease of the lungs caught through means of a neglected cold. He was interred with great magnificence in Westminster, between Spencer and Chaucer. "King Charles pronounced, that Mr Cowley had not left behind him a better man in England.'" Cowley's "countenance and deportment were sweet and amiable, a real index of his mind; in his manners and person there was nothing singular or affected; he had the modesty of a man of genius and the humility of a Christian."

His poetical works consist of Miscellanies, many of the pieces being composed in his early youth; Epistles, Elegies, &c. ; the Mistress, a collection of cold metaphysical love poems; translations of Pindaric Odes; Odes in the style of Pindar; imitations of these compositions became a rage for half a century after: the Latin books "of Plants;" Anacreontics; and the Davideis, a heroic poem in rhyming couplets, which was to have been in twelve books, but the poet completed only four. The greater portion was composed while he was at the university. The Davideis evinces prodigious learning, but it is condemned as heavy and uninteresting, and loaded with the ornaments of a false taste.

Cowley is the greatest of the class of poets in the seventeenth century whom Johnson terms the metaphysical school, of which Donne was the father. The chief characteristic of this " metaphysical" style is the affectation of remote and uncommon imagery, often drawn from scientific sources, and anatomized with a hair-splitting minuteness. Cowley's writings are so deeply imbued with this spirit, that he sometimes, apparently unconsciously, borrows the very words and images of Donne. His style is unequal, rising frequently to nervous grandeur, sinking often to the simplicity of puniness. His vast learning, however, renders his works an exhaustless well of instruction. His prose writing in his prefaces and essays is remarkable for purity and unaffected elegance.

—— TENTANDA VIA EST, QUÀ ME QUOQUE POSSIM TOLLERE HUMO, VICTORQUE VIRÛM VOLITARe per ora. Virg. Georg. iii. 8.

What shall I do to be for ever known,

And make the age to come my own?

I shall, like beasts or common people, die,
Unless you write my elegy;

Whilst others great, by being born, are grown;
Their mothers' labour, not their own.

In this scale gold, in th' other fame does lie,

The weight of that mounts this so high.
These men are Fortune's jewels, moulded bright;
Brought forth with their own fire and light:

If I, her vulgar stone, for either look,

Out of myself it must be strook.

Yet I must on.

What sound is't strikes mine ear?
Sure I Fame's trumpet hear:

It sounds like the last trumpet; for it can
Raise up the buried man.

Unpast Alps stop me; but I'll cut them all,
And march, the Muses' Hannibal.
Hence, all the flattering vanities that lay
Nets of roses in the way!

Hence, the desire of honours or estate,

And all that is not above Fate!

Hence, Love himself, that tyrant of my days,
Which intercepts my coming praise.

Come, my best friends, my books, and lead me on ;
"Tis time that I were gone.

Welcome, great Stagyrite !1 and teach me now
All I was born to know:

Thy scholar's victories thou dost far out-do;

He conquer'd th' earth, the whole world you.
Welcome, learn'd Cicero! whose blest tongue and wit
Preserves Rome's greatness yet:

Thou art the first of orators; only he

Who best can praise thee, next must be.
Welcome the Mantuan swan, Virgil the wise!
Whose verse walks highest, but not flies;
Who brought green Poesy to her perfect age,
And made that art which was a rage.
Tell me, ye mighty Three! what shall I do
To be like one of you?

But you have climb'd the mountain's top, there sit
On the calm flourishing head of it,3

And, whilst with wearied steps we upwards go,
See us, and clouds below.

FROM THE HYMN TO LIGHT.

Say, from what golden quivers of the sky
Do all thy winged arrows fly?

Swiftness and Power by birth are thine:

From thy great sire they came, thy sire, the Word Divine.

Thou in the Moon's bright chariot, proud and gay,
Dost thy bright wood of stars survey;

And all the year dost with thee bring

Of thousand flowery lights thine own nocturnal spring.

1 Aristotle was born at Stagyra, in Macedonia, near the mouth of the Strymon. He was the instructor of Alexander the Great.

Virgil was a native of the village of Andes on the Mincius, near Mantua.

Johnson censures Cowley's frequent use of pronouns as rhymes.

Thou, Scythian-like, dost round thy lands above
The Sun's gilt tent for ever move,

And still, as thou in pomp dost go,

The shining pageants of the world attend thy show.

Nor amidst all these triumphs dost thou scorn
The humble glow-worms to adorn,

And with those living spangles gild

(O greatness without pride !) the bushes of the field.

Night, and her ugly subjects thou dost fright,
And Sleep, the lazy owl of night;

Asham'd, and fearful to appear,

They screen their horrid shapes with the black hemisphere.

With them there hastes, and wildly takes th' alarm,
Of painted dreams a busy swarm:

At the first opening of thine eye

The various clusters break, the antic atoms fly.

At thy appearance, Grief itself is said

To shake his wings, and rouse his head:
And cloudy Care has often took

A gentle beamy smile, reflected from thy look.

When, goddess! thou lift'st up thy waken'd head,
Out of the morning's purple bed,

Thy quire of birds about thee play,
And all the joyful world salutes the rising day.

All the world's bravery, that delights our eyes,
Is but thy several liveries;

Thou the rich dye on them bestow'st,

Thy nimble pencil paints this landscape as thou go'st.

A crimson garment in the rose thou wear'st;
A crown of studded gold thou bear'st;
The virgin-lilies, in their white,

Are clad but with the lawn of almost naked light.

The violet, Spring's little infant, stands

Girt in thy purple swaddling-bands;

On the fair tulip thou dost doat;

Thou cloth'st it in a gay and party-colour'd coat.

Through the soft ways of Heaven, and air, and sea,
Which open all their pores to thee,

Like a clear river thou dost glide,

And with thy living stream through the close channels slide.

But the vast ocean of unbounded day,

In th' empyræan Heaven does stay.

Thy rivers, lakes, and springs, below,

From thence took first their rise, thither at last must flow.1

FROM THE PINDARIC ODES.

DESTRUCTION OF THE FIRST-BORN, IN THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT."

XIV.

It was the time when the still moon
Was mounted softly to her noon,

And dewy sleep, which from night's secret springs arose,
Gently as Nile the land o'erflows;

When, lo, from the high countries of refinéd day,

The golden heaven without allay,

Whose dross in the creation purged away,
Made up the sun's adulterate ray,—

Michael, the warlike prince, does downward fly,
Swift as the journeys of the sight,

Swift as the race of light,

And with his winged will cuts through the yielding sky,
He passed thro' many a star, and, as he passed,
Shone (like a star in them) more brightly there
Than they did in their sphere.

On a tall pyramid's pointed head he stopped at last,
And a mild look of sacred pity cast

Down on the sinful land where he was sent

To inflict the tardy punishment.

"Ah, yet," said he, "yet, stubborn king, repent,
While thus unarmed I stand,

Ere the keen sword of God fill my commanded hand.
Suffer but yet thyself and thine to live;
Who would, alas, believe,

That it for man," said he,

"So hard to be forgiven should be,

And yet for God so easy to forgive."

XV.

He spoke, and downwards flew,

And o'er his shining form a well-cut cloud he threw,

1 The omitted stanzas of the hymn abound with the conceits of the metaphysical poetry. 2 Michael is represented in Scripture as the champion of God's armies against his enemies. Dan. xii. 1-3; Rev. xii. 7. See also Milton, Par. Lost. Book vi.

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