Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/209

Rh They are echoed in one of Wordsworth's earliest characteristic poems, Remembrance of Collins—

"O glide, fair stream! for ever so                       Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,                   Till all our minds for ever flow                       As thy deep waters now are flowing."

There is far more vigour both of thought and expression, in the once popular poetry of Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), whom Clarendon accounted Jonson's greatest successor. Drawn to poetry, like many another subsequently, by the Faerie Queen, Cowley wrote his Pyramus and Thisbe at ten years old, and his Poetical Blossoms were published when he was fourteen. At Cambridge he wrote a pastoral drama and a Latin comedy as well as his Elegy on William Harvey. Driven from Cambridge, he followed his friend Crashaw to Oxford, where he secured the friendship of Falkland, and was attached to the service of Lord St Albans. He attended on the Queen at Paris, and conducted her correspondence with the King. In 1647 his Mistress was published, and in 1656, after his return to England, his Poems, which included the Pindarique Odes and the fragmentary epic the Davideis. He studied medicine, and after the Restoration his chief interests were scientific; he was an original member of the Royal Society. He continued to write verses—including an Ode to Hobbes—but his most interesting product were the delightful Essays, in which he combined verse and easy, natural prose.

In Cowley's poetry, which enjoyed extraordinary