Abraham Cowley resolved, in a long prose preface to the significant 1656 volume of his poems, to write no more poetry. The tumultuous and tragic years of civil war had, he was certain, proved inimical to the poetic muse, and his own ill-fated service to a defeated cause had strengthened a desire to seek calm in some remote American settlement. Though Cowley neither abandoned poetry nor retired to the New World, he did turn increasingly to prose. The prose works move from pressing political, literary, and scientific issues toward a preoccupation with the fulfillment to be found in rural solitude. The essays written in the Kentish countryside near the end of his life and intended, according to his friend and first biographer Thomas Sprat, "as a real Character of his own thoughts upon the point of his Retirement," became especially attractive to later readers; but Cowley is not only...