Naturalness, ease, and
familiarity are bywords among the many assessments of a writer ranked with John Dryden as an important figure in the development of English prose. Together with the poetry, the prose published in the first years of the Restoration and in the posthumous 1668 edition of his collected works complements and completes an artistic development that reveals, in its classical, almost archetypal pattern, a unique and unified design.
The 1668 edition includes the autobiographical "Of My self," the last of the eleven pieces in "Several Discourses by Way of Essays, in Verse and Prose"; perhaps Cowley's final work, it clearly establishes the continuity of the author's life. Recalling childhood days spent wandering in the fields with no other companion than a book, Cowley contends that "I was then of the same mind as I am now (which I confess, I wonder at my self.)." Three stanzas from an ode he wrote at the age of thirteen affirm the desire for a moderate life of bookish retirement, a desire inspired by Horace and "the Poets" the schoolboy immaturely and immoderately loved. Delightful hours in the family parlor reading the poetry of Edmund Spenser made him by the age of twelve, in the essay's curious phrase, "a Poet as immediately as a Child is made an Eunuch"; and only the outbreak of civil war interrupted the love of letters that flourished in his university years.
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