[P. 117], No. cv.—I have taken the liberty of omitting nine out of the twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley’s; still less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole, which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any which remain, from his Elegy; which led Milton to omit from the Spirit’s Prologue in Comus sixteen glorious lines which may still be seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in the notes to later editions of his Poems.—l. 45-56: Johnson has said, urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, ‘if Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.’ Let Dryden have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as satisfying to the ear as to the mind.—l. 68: This line is certainly perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined it runs thus,
‘Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.’
In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed,
‘Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.’
The line seems in neither shape to yield any tolerable sense—not in the first, with ‘Light’ regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second, which only acquires some sort of meaning when ‘colours’ is treated as a genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am so little satisfied with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it.
[P. 120], No. cvi.—Hallam has said that ‘Cowley upon the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,’ adding, however, that ‘some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.’ This may have been so, but a man’s contemporaries have some opportunities of judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not only by what he does, but by what he is; and oftentimes a man is more than he does; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come in actual contact with him which is only inadequately justified by aught which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many a man’s embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some men’s, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question Mr. Hallam’s assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of imagination, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham, the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will show:
‘Old mother Wit and Nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;
In Spenser and in Jonson Art
Of slower Nature got the start;