Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

The moderate value of our guiltless oreMakes no man atheist, and no woman whore;Yet why should hallow’d vestal’s sacred shrineDeserve more honour than a flaming mine?These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be,Than a few embers, for a deity.Had he our pits, the Persian would admireNo sun, but warm’s devotion at our fire:He’d leave the trotting whipster, and preferOur profound Vulcan ’bove that waggoner.For wants he heat, or light? or would have storeOf both? ’tis here: and what can suns give more?Nay, what’s the sun but, in a different name,A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame?Then let this truth reciprocally run,The sun’s heaven’s coalery, and coals our sun.

Death, a voyage:

      No familyE’er rigg’d a soul for Heaven’s discovery,With whom more venturers might boldly dareVenture their stakes with him in joy to share.—Donne.

Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such as no figures or licence can reconcile to the understanding.

A lover neither dead nor alive:

Then down I laid my headDown on cold earth; and for a while was dead,And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled.   Ah, sottish soul, said I,   When back to its cage again I saw it fly;   Fool to resume her broken chain,   And row her galley here again!   Fool, to that body to returnWhere it condemned and destined is to burn!Once dead, how can it be,Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee,That thou should’st come to live it o’er again in me?—Cowley.

A lover’s heart, a hand grenado:

Woe to her stubborn heart, if once mine come   Into the self same room;   ’Twill tear and blow up all within,Like a grenade shot into a magazine.Then shall Love keep the ashes and torn parts,   Of both our broken hearts;   Shalt out of both one new one make;From hers th’ allay, from mine the metal take.—Cowley.

The poetical propagation of light:

The prince’s favour is diffused o’er all,From which all fortunes names, and natures fall:Then from those wombs of stars, the Bride’s bright eyes,   At every glance a constellation flies,And sows the court with stars, and doth prevent   In light and power, the all-ey’d firmament:First her eye kindles other ladies’ eyes,   Then from their beams their jewels’ lustres rise;And from their jewels torches do take fire,And all is warmth, and light, and good desire.—Donne.

They were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts.

That a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality is by Cowley thus expressed:

Thou in my fancy dost much higher standThan woman can be placed by Nature’s hand;And I must needs, I’m sure, a loser be,To change thee as thou’rt there, for very thee.

That prayer and labour should co-operate are thus taught by Donne:

In none but us are such mix’d engines found,As hands of double office; for the groundWe till with them; and them to heaven we raiseWho prayerless labours, or, without this, prays,Doth but one half, that’s none.

By the same author, a common topic, the danger of procrastination, is thus illustrated:

   That which I should have begunIn my youth’s morning, now late must be done;And I, as giddy travellers must do,Which stray or sleep all day, and having lostLight and strength, dark and tired, must then ride post.

All that man has to do is to live and die; the sum of humanity is comprehended by Donne in the following lines:

Think in how poor a prison thou didst lieAfter 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 rageOf sicknesses or their true mother, age.But think that death hath now enfranchised thee;Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty;Think, that a rusty piece discharged is flownIn 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 disgusting.  Cowley thus apostrophises beauty:

   Thou tyrant which leav’st no man free!Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be!Thou murtherer, which has kill’d, and devil, which would’st 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 thy thoughts scarce any tracts have beenSo much as of original sin,Such charms thy beauty wears, as mightDesires in dying confest saints excite.   Thou with strange adulteryDost 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.—Donne.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,As that which from chas’d musk-cat’s pores doth trill,As th’ almighty balm of th’ 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;The love within too strong for’t was,Like poison put into a Venice-glass.—Cowley.

In forming descriptions, they looked out not for images, but for conceits.  Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended 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 divestTo-morrow’s business; when the labourers haveSuch 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 isTo-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man,Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them theAgain by death, although sad watch he keep;Doth practise dying by a little sleep:Thou at this midnight seest me.

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

   Hops, whose weak being mind 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 dust 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 tester of delight,   Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour’st it quite!   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 deflowr’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 tasteIf 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 the better claim:

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,   Though I must go, endure not yetA 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 hearkens 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 Miscellanies contain a collection of short compositions, written some as they were dictated by a mind at leisure, and some as they were called forth by different occasions; with great variety of style and sentiment, from burlesque levity to awful grandeur.  Such an assemblage of diversified excellence no other poet has hitherto afforded.  To choose the best, among many good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism.  I know not whether Scaliger himself has persuaded many readers to join with him in his preference of the two favourite odes, which he estimates in his raptures at the value of a kingdom.  I will, however, venture to recommend Cowley’s first piece, which ought to be inscribed “To my Muse,” for want of which the second couplet is without reference.  When the title is added, there wills till remain a defect; for every piece ought to contain in itself whatever is necessary to make it intelligible.  Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are 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’ th’ 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.

It may be remarked, that in this elegy, and in most of his encomiastic poems, he has forgotten or neglected to name his heroes.

In his poem on the death of Hervey, there is much praise, but little passion; a very just and ample delineation of such virtues as a studious privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence as a mind not yet called forth to action can display.  He knew how to distinguish, and how to commend, the qualities of his companion; 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 gaiety of fancy, such facility of expression, such varied similitude, such a succession of images, and such a dance of words, it is in vain to expect except from Cowley.  His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastic mind.  His levity never leaves his learning behind it; the moralist, the politician, and the critic, mingle their influence even in this airy frolic of genius.  To such a performance Suckling could have brought the gaiety, but not the knowledge; Dryden could have supplied the knowledge, but not the gaiety.

The verses to Davenant, which are vigorously begun, and happily concluded, contain some hints of criticism very justly conceived and happily expressed.  Cowley’s critical abilities have not been sufficiently observed: the few decisions and remarks, which his prefaces and his notes on the “Davideis” supply, were at that time accessions to English literature, and show such skill as raises our wish for more examples.

The lines from Jersey are a very curious and pleasing specimen of the familiar 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 raysLike Whiston wanting pyx or stars,   In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

Cowley seems to have had what Milton is believed to have wanted, the skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has therefore closed his Miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainment, but above their ambition.

To the Miscellanies succeed the Anacreontics, or paraphrastical translations of some little poems, which pass, however justly, under the name of Anacreon.  Of those songs dedicated to festivity and gaiety, 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 made more amiable to common readers, and perhaps, if they would honestly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater 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 distance 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 produces 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 new meanings of words, are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.

The Anacreontics, 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 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, or 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 mention the ancients, he might have found it full-blown in modern Italy.  Thus Sannazaro:

Aspice quam variis distringar Lesbia curis!   Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:Sum Nilus, sumque Ætna simul; restringite flammas   O lacrimæ, aut lacrimas ebibe flamma meas.

One of the severe theologians of that time censured him as having published a book of profane and 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 discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his works will sufficiently evince.

Cowley’s “Mistress” has no power of seduction: she “plays round the head, but comes not at the heart.”  Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion.  His poetical accounts of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity.  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 condemn as unnatural.

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

The spirit of Pindar is indeed not everywhere 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 thouSitt’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 isLofty as that and smooth as this.

In the Nemæan Ode, the reader must, in mere justice to Pindar, observe, whatever is said of the original new moon, her tender forehead and her horns, is superadded by his paraphrast, who has many other plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original, as,

   The table, free for ev’ry guest,   No doubt will thee admit,And feast more upon thee, than thou on it

He sometimes extends his author’s thoughts without improving them.  In the Olympionic an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends three lines in swearing by the Castalian Stream.  We are told of Theron’s bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in rhyming prose:

But in this thankless world the giverIs envied even by the receiver;’Tis now the cheap and frugal fashionRather to hide than own the obligation:Nay, ’tis much worse than so;It now an artifice does growWrongs and injuries to do,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 Pindaric; 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 well-fitted 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,My music’s voice shall bear it company;   Till all gentle notes be drown’dIn 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 hard-mouth’d horse—’Twill 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 their 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 entitled the “Muse,” who goes to “take the air” in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses Fancy and Judgment, 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 letThe coachman Art be set;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,In all their gaudy liveries.

Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I cannot refuse myself the four next lines: