Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. II. The Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson to Dryden
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)Extracts from Pindarique Odes: To Mr. Hobbes
V
I oft have seen, and read,
But all are bodies dead,
Or bodies by art fashioned;
I never yet the living soul could see,
But in thy books and thee.
’Tis only God can know
Whether the fair idea thou dost show
Agree entirely with his own or no;
This I dare boldly tell,
’Tis so like truth ’twill serve our turn as well.
Just as in nature thy proportions be,
As full of concord their variety,
As firm the parts upon their centre rest,
And all so solid are that they, at least
As much as nature, emptiness detest.
The universal intellectual reign,
Saw his own country’s short-lived leopard slain;
The stronger Roman eagle did outfly,
Oftener renewed his age, and saw that die;
Mecca itself, in spite of Mahomet possessed,
And chas’d by a wild deluge from the east,
His monarchy new planted in the west.
But as in time each great imperial race
Degenerates, and gives some new one place,
So did this noble empire waste,
Sunk by degrees from glories past,
And in the school-men’s hands it perished quite at last.
Then nought but words it grew,
And those all barbarous too.
It perished, and it vanished there,
The life and soul breath’d out became but empty air.
Spent and outworn return no harvest now,
In barren age wild and unglorious lie,
And boast of past fertility,
The poor relief of present poverty.
Food and fruit we now must want
Unless new lands we plant.
We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands;
Old rubbish we remove;
To walk in ruins, like vain ghosts, we love,
And with fond divining wands
We search among the dead
For treasures buried,
Whilst still the liberal earth does hold
So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.
And slender-limbed Mediterranean,
Seem narrow creeks to thee, and only fit
For the poor wretched fisher-boats of wit.
Thy nobler vessel the vast ocean tries,
And nothing sees but seas and skies,
Till unknown regions it descries,
Thou great Columbus of the golden lands of new philosophies!
Thy task was harder much than his,
For thy learn’d America is
Not only found out first by thee,
And rudely left to future industry,
But thy eloquence and thy wit
Has planted, peopled, built, and civiliz’d it.
(Nor, being my own self so poor,
Could comprehend so vast a store)
That all the wardrobe of rich eloquence,
Could have afforded half enough,
Of bright, of new, and lasting stuff,
To clothe the mighty limbs of thy gigantic sense.
Thy solid reason like the shield from heaven
To the Trojan hero given,
Too strong to take a mark from any mortal dart,
Yet shines with gold and gems in every part,
And wonders on it grav’d by the learn’d hand of art;
A shield that gives delight
Even to the enemies’ sight,
Then when they’re sure to lose the combat by’t.
Upon thy reverend head
Quench or allay the noble fires within,
But all which thou hast been
And all that youth can be thou’rt yet,
So fully still dost thou
Enjoy the manhood, and the bloom of wit,
And all the natural heat, but not the fever too.
So contraries on Ætna’s top conspire,
Here hoary frosts, and by them breaks out fire.
A secure peace the faithful neighbours keep,
Th’ emboldened snow next to the flame does sleep.
And if we weigh, like thee,
Nature, and causes, we shall see
That thus it needs must be:
To things immortal time can do no wrong,
And that which never is to die, for ever must be young.