COWLEY AND THOMSON. Nature intended poetry as well as matter of fact.-Mysterious anecdote of Cowley.-Remarkable similarity between him and Thomson.-Their supposed difference (as Tory and Whig).— Thomson's behaviour to Lady Hertford.-His answer to the genius-starvation principle.-His letters to his friends, &c. "Nec vos, dulcissima mundi Nomina, vos, Musæ, libertas, otia, libri, You, of all names the sweetest and the best, THESE verses, both the Latin and the translation, are from the pen of an excellent man, and a better poet than he has latterly been thought-Cowley. But how came he, among his "sweetest and best names," to omit love? to leave out all mention of the affections? Thereby hangs an anecdote that shall be noticed presently. Meantime, with a protest against the omission, the verses make a good motto for this verse-loving paper, begun on a fine summer's morning, amidst books and flowers. Our position is not so lucky as Cowley's in respect to " woods," having nothing to boast of, in that matter, beyond the suburbanity of a few lime-trees, and the neighbourhood of Kensington-gardens; but this does not hinder us from loving woods with all our might, nay, aggravates the intensity of the passion. A like reason favours our yearning after "liberty" and "rest," and especially after "fields;" the brickmakers threatening to swallow up those which the nurserymen have left us. Well! We always hope to live in the thick of all that we desire, some day; and, meantime, we do live there as well as imagination can contrive it; which she does in a better manner than is realized by many a possessor of oaks thick as his pericranium. A book, a picture, a memory, puts us, in the twinkling of an eye, in the midst of the most enchanting solitudes, reverend with ages, beautiful with lawns and deer, glancing with the lovely forms of nymphs. And it does not at all baulk us, when we look up and find ourselves sitting in a little room with a fire-place, and, perhaps, with some town-cry coming along the street. Your muffin-crier is a being as full of the romantic mystery of existence, as a Druid or an ancient Tuscan; and what would books or pictures be, or cities themselves, without that mind of man, in the circuit of whose world the solitudes of poetry lie, as surely as the last Court Calendar does, or the traffic of Piccadilly. Do the "green" minds of the "knowing" fancy that Nature intended nothing to be made out of trees, but coachwheels, and a park or so? Oh, they of little wit! Nature intended trees to do all that they do do; that is to help to furnish poetry for us as well as houses; to exist in the imagination as well as in Buckinghamshire; to "Live in description, and look green in song." Nature intended that there should be odes and epic poems, quite as much as that men in Bondstreet should eat tartlets, or that there should be Howards, and Rothschilds. The Earl of Surrey would have told you so, who was himself a Howard, and who perished on the scaffold, while his poems have gone on, living and lasting. Nature's injunction was not only, "Let there be things tangible;" but "Let there be things also imaginable, fanciful, spiritual;" thoughts of fairies and elysiums; Arcadias two-fold, one in real Greece, and the other in fabulous; Cowleys and Miltons as well as Cromwells; immortal Shakspeares, as well as customs that would perish but for their notice. Alas! "your poet," nevertheless, is not exempt from " your weakness," as Falstaff would have phrased it. He occasionally undergoes a double portion, in the process of a sensibility which exists for our benefit; and good, innocent, sequestered Cowley, whose desires in things palpable appear to have been bounded by a walk in a wood, and a book under his arm, must have experienced some strange phases of suffering. Sprat says of him, that he was the "most amiable of mankind;" and yet it is reported, that in his latter days he could not endure the sight of a woman! that he would leave the room if one came into it! Here is a case for the respectful consideration of the philosopher-the medical, we suspect. The supposed reason is, that he had been disappointed in love, perhaps ill-treated. But in so gentle a mind as his, disappointment could hardly have taken the shape of resentment and incivility towards the whole sex. The probability is, that it was some morbid weakness. He should have out-walked and diverted it, instead of getting fat and looking at trees out of a window; he should have gone more to town and the play, or written more plays of his own, instead of relieving his morbidity with a bottle too much in company with his friend the Dean. We suspect, however, from the portraits of Cowley, that his blood was not very healthy by nature. There is a young as well as an old portrait of him, by good artists, evident likenesses; and both of them have a puffy, unwholesome look; so that his flesh seems to have been an uncongenial habitation for so sweet a soul. The sweeter it, for preserving its dulcitudes as it did. This morbid temperament is, perhaps, the only difference in their natures between two men, in whom we shall proceed to notice what appears to us a remarkable similarity in every other respect, almost amounting to a sort of identity. It is like a metempsychosis without a form of change; or only with such as would naturally result from a difference of times. Cowley and Thomson were alike in their persons, their dispositions, and their fortunes. They were both fat men, not handsome; very amiable and sociable; no enemies to a bottle; taking interest both in politics and retirement; passionately fond of external nature, of fields, woods, gardens, &c.; bachelors,-in love, and disappointed; faulty in style, yet true poets in themselves, if not always the best in their writings, that is to say, seeing everything in its poetical light; childlike in their ways; and, finally, they were both made easy in their circumstances by the party whom they served; both went to live at a little distance from London, and on the banks of the Thames; and both died of a cold and fever, originating in a careless exposure to the weather, not without more than a suspicion of previous "jollification" with " the Dean" on Cowley's part, and great probability of a like vivacity on that of Thomson, who had been visiting his friends in London. Thomson could push the bottle like a regular bon vivant: and Cowley's death is attributed |