But I who thus present myself as new,

Am thus made new by you.

Had not your rays dwelt on me, one long night
Had shut me up from sight.

Your beams exhale me from among

Things tumbling in the common throng.
Who thus with your fire burns,

Now gives not, but returns.

To others then be this a day of thrift:
They do receive; but you, sir, make the gift.

ON A VIRTUOUS YOUNG GENTLEWOMAN THAT DIED

SUDDENLY.

When the old flaming Prophet climb'd the sky,
Who, at one glimpse, did vanish, and not die,
He made more preface to a death than this:
So far from sick, she did not breathe amiss.
She, who to Heaven more heaven doth annex,
Whose lowest thought was above all our sex,
Accounted nothing death but t' be repriev'd,
And died as free from sickness as she liv'd.
Others are dragg'd away, or must be driven,
She only saw her time and stepp'd to Heaven,
Where Seraphims view all her glories o'er
As one return'd, that had been there before.
For while she did this lower world adorn,
Her body seem'd rather assum'd than born:
So rarefied, advanc'd, so pure and whole,
That body might have been another's soul;
And equally a miracle it were,

That she could die, or that she could live here.

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

[ABRAHAM COWLEY was the posthumous son of a London stationer, and was born in the latter part of the year 1618. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1636 to 1643. He took the royalist side during the Civil War, and helped the King's cause both at Oxford and afterwards as Secretary to the Queen in her exile in Paris. In 1655 he returned to England, where he remained under strict surveillance till Cromwell's death; then he rejoined his friends in France. At the Restoration he came back, and lived in retirement at Barnes and Chertsey till his death in 1667. His poems were published in the following order: Poetical Blossomes, 1633; Love's Riddle, a comedy, 1638; The Mistress, 1647; The Guardian (surreptitiously published), 1650: the first folio edition of the Works, 1656; other editions of the same followed with the addition of such new poems and essays as he produced from time to time. The most complete editions of his works are those which appeared in 1708 and 1721.]

The history of Cowley's reputation offers an easy text for a discourse on the variations of the standard of taste. A marvel of precocity, widely known as a poet at fifteen; the poetical wonder of Cambridge; so famous at thirty that pirates and forgers made free with his name on their title-pages while he was serving the exiled queen; issuing in self-defence, at thirty-eight, a folio of his poems which was destined to pass through eight editions in a generation; accepted by his literary contemporaries, men of cultivated intelligence, as not only the greatest among themselves, but greater than all that had gone before; buried in state at Westminster by the side of Chaucer and Spenser, and ranked by his biographer, a sober critic, as equal not only to them but to 'the authors of that true antiquity, the best of the Greeks and Romans'; -in thirty years he had sunk out of notice and his name had become a mere memory, mentioned honoris causa but no more. 'Though

he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer,' said Dryden in 1700. Addison praised him with even more discrimination. Two editions of his works appeared early in the eighteenth century, but in 1737 Pope was able to ask 'Who now reads Cowley?' Then followed Johnson's celebrated Life, which has eclipsed for almost every one the works of its subject. Except for a few students like Lamb and Sir Egerton Brydges, Cowley's verse is in this century unread and unreadable. Not even the antiquarian curiosity of an age which reprints Brathwaite and Crowne has yet availed to present him in a new edition. The reasons of this extraordinary decline in a poetical reputation are not difficult to find; Dryden absorbed all that was best in Cowley, and superseded him for the readers of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, which reads Dryden little, naturally reads Cowley less. Yet criticism has to justify great names. There must be something in a man who was regarded by his age, and that an age which boasted of having outgrown all illusions, as the most profound and ingenious of its writers. A rapid review of Cowley's work will help us to judge between the estimate of his time and the estimate of posterity.

With the volume of Poetical Blossomes which he published at fifteen, when he was a schoolboy at Westminster, we are not further concerned than to note its vast superiority to the verses of most clever boys. If Cowley, like Chatterton, had died before manhood, these verses might perhaps have kept his name alive; but as it is he soon outdid them, and in his mature writings he valued them justly as 'commendable extravagance in a boy,' but declined to give them a place in the permanent collection of his poems. Some stanzas from The Wish he excepted, quoting them in his pleasant essay Of Myself as verses of which 'I should hardly now be ashamed.' He wrote them at thirteen, he says; and our extracts may fairly begin with them. But in the main we shall be right in confining ourselves to the mature poems of the Folio of 1656, with the additions that were made to it during his lifetime. He meant it to be a definitive edition of his poems; he excluded much from it deliberately, and he intended to add nothing to it. In 1656, as he says in his most interesting Preface-a class of writing which he raised to a new importancein 1656 he felt in no mood for making poetry. The times were against it, his own health of body and mind were against it. ‘A warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write of, but worst to

write in.' Living as a political suspect, with scanty means and no prospects, he had no encouragement to write. The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end of poesy.' He was seriously turning his thoughts away from Cromwell's England; planning an 'obscure retreat' in the American plantations; and the book was to be a legacy to the world to which he would soon be dead. As every one knows, times changed, and he did not go to America. The Restoration brought him, not success indeedhis failure to obtain the Mastership of the Savoy was pathetically bewailed by him-but relief from all pressing necessities, and a quiet home first at Barnes and then at Chertsey, not beyond the reach of visits from Evelyn and Dean Sprat and other appreciative friends. In such surroundings he made his peace with the Muse and wrote during the years that remained to him some of his best poems.

The divisions of the Folio are (1) Miscellanies, including Anacreontiques; (2) The Mistress, a collection of love poems; (3) Pindarique Odes; (4) Davideis, an heroic poem of the troubles of David; and, in the later issues, (5) Verses on various occasions, and (6) Several Discourses by way of Essays in verse and prose. The Miscellanies, he tells us, are poems preserved by chance from a much larger number-some of them the works of his early youth, and some, like the celebrated Elegy on Crashaw, belonging to his best years. What we notice in these pages, as in all that Cowley published, is his curious inability to distinguish good from bad; he prints rubbish, like the intolerable Ode 'Here's to thee Dick,' side by side with the touching verses on the death of his friend Mr. William Hervey; he mars poem after poem with some scholastic absurdity or comparison drawn from a science that has nothing to do with poetry. The fine lines on Falkland, for example—lines that we should prize if only as a memorial of the friendship between two such interesting men-these lines are ruined, poetically speaking, by Cowley's science. Falkland is gone on the expedition against the Scots, and the poet addresses the North :

'Great is thy charge, O North! be wise and just:

England commits her Falkland to thy trust;

Return him safe; Learning would rather choose

Her Bodley or her Vatican to lose.

All things that are but writ or printed there

In his unbounded breast engraven are.'

So far the conceit may pass; but what are we to say of the illustrations by which Cowley would show us the order that reigns in the crowded mind of his hero?

'So thousand divers species fill the air,

Yet neither crowd nor mix confusedly there.'

What are we to say of the political image under which, with elephantine humour, he pretends to complain of Falkland's too great learning?

How could he answer 't, if the State saw fit

To question a monopoly of wit?'

It is a painful but inevitable thought that Cowley was better pleased with his 'species' and his 'monopoly' than with the noble lines which follow-lines whose force, condensation, dignity and rhythm have hardly been surpassed by Dryden himself :

'Such is the man whom we require the same
We lent the North, untouched as is his fame.
He is too good for war, and ought to be
As far from danger as from fear he's free.
Those men alone (and they are useful too)
Whose valour is the only art they know

Were for sad war and bloody battles born:
Let them the state defend, and he adorn!

The Mistress (which had been printed in 1647) is a collection of about a hundred love-poems, explained by the author in the preface to the Folio as being mere feigned addresses to some fair creature of the fancy. 'So it is that Poets are scarce thought Freemen of the Company without paying some duties and obliging themselves to be true to Love.' The apology, even if true, was hardly required even by Puritan strictness; for with two or three exceptions the poems are as cold as icy conceits can make them. Johnson's characteristic judgment is hardly too severe : '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.' It is as though in the course of a hundred years the worst fancies which Wyatt had borrowed from Petrarch had become fossilized, and were yet brought out by Cowley to do duty for living thoughts. What is love? he seems to ask: it is an interchange of hearts, a flame, a worship, a river to be frozen by disdain-he has a hundred such physical and psychological images of it; and the poetry consists in taking the images one by one and developing them in merciless disregard of taste and truth of feeling. Is love