Cowley is full of these tasteless, unnatural conceits. His sins of the kind have been so insisted upon by Johnson and others that I need give but a single illustration. In an ode to his friend, Dr. Scarborough, he thus compliments him upon his skill in operating for calculus: The cruel stone, that restless pain, That’s sometimes rolled away in vain But still, like Sisyphus his stone, returns again, Thou break’st and melt’st by learned juices’ force (A greater work, though short the way appear, Than Hannibal’s by vinegar). Oppressed Nature’s necessary course It stops in vain; like Moses, thou Strik’st but the rock, and straight the waters freely flow. Here, in a passage of nine lines, the stone which the doctor removes from his patient’s bladder is successively compared to the stone rolled away from Christ’s sepulchre, the stone of Sisyphus, the Alps that Hannibal split with vinegar, and the rock which Moses smote for water. Manifestly this way of writing lends itself least of all to the poetry of passion. Cowley’s love poems are his very worst failures. One can take a kind of pleasure in the sheer mental exercise of tracking the thought through one of his big Pindaric odes—the kind of pleasure one gets from solving a riddle or an equation, but not the kind which we ask of poetry. It is as Pope says: his epic and Pindaric art is forgotten; forgotten the four books, in rimed couplets, of the “Davideis”; forgotten the odes on Brutus, on the plagues of Egypt, on his Majesty’s restoration, to Mr. Hobbes, and to the Royal Society. Cowley had a genius for friendship, and his elegies are among his best things. There are passages well worthy of remembrance in his elegy on Crashaw, and several fine stanzas in his memorial verses on his Cambridge friend Hervey; though the piece, as a whole, is too long, and Dr. Johnson is probably singular in preferring it to “Lycidas.” A hundred readers are familiar with the invocation to light in “Paradise Lost,” for one who knows Cowley’s ingenious and, in many parts, really beautiful “Hymn to Light.”