with Addison’s,
‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.’
[P. 92], No. lxxvii.—Wordsworth in the Preface to an early edition of his works calls attention to Cotton’s well-nigh forgotten poetry, some of it abundantly deserving the oblivion into which it has fallen, but some of a very rare excellence in its kind. This he does, quoting largely from his Ode to Winter, mainly with the purpose of illustrating the distinction between fancy, of which these poems, in his judgment, have much, and imagination, of which they have little or none. They have a merit which certainly strikes me more than any singular wealth of fancy which I can find in them; and which to Wordsworth also must have constituted their chief attraction, namely, the admirable English in which they are written. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes blemished by more serious faults; but for homely vigour and purity of language, for the total absence of any attempt to conceal the deficiency of strong and high imagination by a false poetic diction—purple rags torn from other men’s garments, and sewn upon his own—he may take his place among the foremost masters of the tongue. Coleridge has said as much (Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 96): ‘There are not a few poems in that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.’ I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several stanzas toward the close have been omitted.
[P. 95], No. lxxxviii.—Johnson has justly praised the ‘unequalled fertility of invention’ displayed in this poem, and in its pendant, Against Hope. To estimate all the wonder of them, they should be read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched criticism, which Addison has called An Account of the greatest English Poets, there is one exception to the shallowness or falseness of most of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem exemplifies. These are the first six lines:
‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,
O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;
His turns too closely on the reader press,
He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;
One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes