“What numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen and good Christians have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops! Oh, Sir, if we could but see the shape of our dear mother England, as poets are wont to give a personal form to what they please, how would she appear, think ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head and tears abundantly flowing from her eyes, to behold so many of her children exposed at once and thrust from things of dearest necessity, because their conscience could not assent to things which the bishops thought indifferent?… Let the astrologer be dismayed at the portentous blaze of comets and impressions in the air, as foretelling troubles and changes to states; I shall believe there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation (God turn the omen from us!) than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are enforced by heaps to forsake their native country.”[268] Here in a few words are the sacrifices made by our fathers, as they turned from their English homes, and also the conscience which prompted and sustained them. Begun in sacrifice and in conscience, their empire grew and flourished with constant and increasing promise of future grandeur. ABRAHAM COWLEY, 1667. Contemporary with Milton, and at the time a rival for the palm of poetry, was Abraham Cowley, born 1618, died 28th July, 1667. His biography stands at the head of Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets,” the first in that instructive collection. The two poets were on opposite sides,--Milton for the Commonwealth, Cowley for the King. His genius was recognized in his own time; and when he died, at the age of forty-nine, after a night of exposure under the open sky, Charles the Second said, “Mr. Cowley has not left a better man behind him in England.” He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Spenser. He composed, in much-admired Latin verse, six books on Plants: the first and second in elegiac verse, displaying the qualities of herbs; the third and fourth in various measures, on the beauties of flowers; and the fifth and sixth in hexameters, like the Georgics, on the uses of trees. The first two books, in Latin, appeared in 1662; the other four, also in Latin, were not published till 1668, the year after his death. They did not see the English light till near the close of the century, when a translation was published by Tate, from which I quote. Two fruits of America are commemorated. The first is that which becomes Chocolate:--