Flitting on glancing wings that yield a summer’s sound.
Jeremiah Holme Wiffin, 1792–1836.
XV.
The Streams.
A volume of general selections from English rural verse would be incomplete without some passage from Denham’s poem of “Cooper’s Hill”—a poem so highly lauded by past generations, and which we still read to-day with admiration. Sir John Denham is one of those poets who have met with very opposite treatment from critics of different generations; after receiving the highest commendations from Dryden, from Johnson, from Pope, from Somerville, his bays have been very severely handled in our own time. But allowing him to have been over-praised at one period, shall we for that reason refuse ourselves the pleasure he is assuredly capable of affording us? Is not “Cooper’s Hill” a fine old poem of the second class, which the nineteenth century does well to read once in a while? The celebrated lines, quoted a thousand times,
“Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage; without o’erflowing, full,”
were amusingly parodied some fifty years ago by Mr. Soame Jenyns, in his satire upon an unfledged, ignorant memberling of Parliament:
“Without experience, honesty, or sense,
Unknowing in her interests, trade, or laws,
He vainly undertakes his country’s cause;