Page:The Works of Abraham Cowley - volume 1 (ed. Aikin) (1806).djvu/131

Rh tiam, per medias laudes, quasi cjuadrigis vehentem, transversa incurrit misera fortuna reipublicæ ."

Neither is the present constitution of my mind more proper than that of the times for this exercise, or rather divertisement. There is nothing that requires so much serenity and cheerfulness of spirit; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of life, or overcast with the clouds of melancholy and sorrow, or shaken and disturbed by the storms of injurious fortune; it must, like the halcyon, have fair weather to breed in. The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others; which is the main end of poesy. One may see through the style of Ovid de Trist the humbled and dejected condition of spirit with which he wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that genius,

The cold of the country had strucken through all his faculties, and benumbed the very feet of his verses. He is himself, methinks, like one of the stories of his own Metamorphosis; and, though there remain some weak resemblances of Ovid at Rome, it is but, as he says of Niobe ,