Cowley and Waller.
Two other poets of these times I name, because of the great reputation they once had; a reputation far greater than they maintain now. These are Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.[55] The former of these (Cowley) was the son of a London grocer, whose shop was not far from the home of Izaak Walton; he was taught at Westminster School, and at Cambridge, and blazed up precociously at the age of fifteen in shining verses.[56] Indeed his aptitude, his ingenuities, his scholarship, kept him in the first rank of men of letters all through his day, and gave him burial between Spenser and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. He would take a humbler place if he were disentombed now; yet, in Cromwell’s time, or in that of Charles II., the average reading man knew Cowley better than he knew Milton, and admired him more. I give you a fragment of what is counted his best; it is from his “Hymn to Light:”
“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 sev’ral liveries,
Thou the rich dye on them bestowest,
Thy nimble pencil paints this landscape as thou goest.
“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!”
If I were to read a fragment from Tennyson in contrast with Cowley’s treatment of a similar theme I think you might wonder less why his reputation has suffered gradual eclipse. Shall we try? Cowley wrote a poem in memory of a dear friend, and I take one of the pleasantest of its verses:
“Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say,
Have ye not seen us walking every day?
Was there a tree about, which did not know
The love betwixt us two?
Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade,
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into darksome shades combine,
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.”
Tennyson wrote of his dead friend, and here is a verse of it:
“The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well
Thro’ four sweet years, arose and fell
From flower to flower, from snow to snow;
But where the path we walk’d began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended, following hope,
There sat the shadow feared of man,
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapped thee formless in the fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow—though I walk in haste;
And think—that somewhere in the waste,
The shadow sits, and waits for me!”
Can I be wrong in thinking that under the solemn lights of these stanzas the earlier poet’s verse grows dim?
Cowley was a good Kingsman; and in the days of the Commonwealth held position of secretary to the exiled Queen Henrietta, in Paris; he did, at one time, think of establishing himself in one of the American colonies; returned, however, to his old London haunts, and, wearying of the city, sought retirement at Chertsey, on the Thames’ banks (where his old house is still to be seen), and where he wrote, in graceful prose and cumbrous verse, on subjects related to country life—which he loved overmuch—and died there among his trees and the meadows.
Waller was both Kingsman and Republican—steering deftly between extremes, so as to keep himself and his estates free from harm. This will weaken your sympathy for him at once—as it should do. He lived in a grand way—affected the philosopher; was such a philosopher as quick-witted selfishness makes; yet he surely had wonderful aptitudes in dealing with language, and could make its harmonious numbers flow where and how he would. Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from the “hysterical riot of the Jacobeans” into measured and orderly classic cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of technique only; they write as distinct art-masters; while we, who are taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of sound.
Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young; thenceforth, for many years—a gay and coquettish widower—he pursued the Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this:
“Go, lovely Rose,
Tell her, that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have, uncommended, died.”
But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married—like a wise woman—somebody else. And he? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever—sang till he was over eighty.