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
Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,
Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros
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 water’s 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,
Although I fear
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 shown:
For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,
I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.
The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior—
Ye critics, say,
How poor to this was Pindar’s style!
Even those who cannot perhaps find in the Isthmian or Nemæan songs what Antiquity what disposed them to expect, will at least see that they are ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine that, if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.
To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley’s sentiments must be added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of using in any place a verse of any length, from two syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very little harmony to a modern ear; yet by examining the syllables we perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought therefore to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.
It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the “irregularity of numbers is the very thing” which makes “that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects.” But he should have remembered, that what is fit for everything can fit nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice is regulated, and the memory relieved.
If the Pindaric style be, what Cowley thinks it, “the highest and noblest kind of writing in verse,” it can be adapted only to high and noble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critic, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse which, according to Sprat, “is chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to prose.”