But now restrain’d from sea, from camp, from court,
  And by a tempest blown into a port;
  I raise my thoughts to muse on higher things,
  And eccho arms, and loves of Queens and Kings.

  Which Queens (despising crowns and Hymen’s band)
  Would neither men obey, nor men command: 
  Great pleasure from rough seas to see the shore
  Or from firm land to hear the billows roar.

We are told that he composed several other things remaining still in manuscript, which he had not leisure to compleat; even some of the printed pieces have not all the finishing so ingenious an author could have bestowed upon them; for as the writer of his Life observes, ’being, for his loyalty and zeal to his Majesty’s service, tossed from place to place, and from country to country, during the unsettled times of our anarchy, some of his Manuscripts falling into unskilful hands, were printed and published without his knowledge, and before he could give them the last finishing strokes.’  But that was not the case with his Translation of the Pastor Fido, which was published by himself, and applauded by some of the best judges, particularly Sir John Denham, who after censuring servile translators, thus goes on,

  A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
  To make translations and translators too. 
  They but preserve the ashes, these the flame,
  True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

Footnotes:  1.  Short Account of Sir Richard Fanshaw, prefixed to his Letters. 2.  Wood, Fast. ed. 1721, vol. ii. col. 43, 41. 3.  Wood, ubi supra.

* * * * *

AbrahamCowley

Was the son of a Grocer, and born in London, in Fleet-street, near the end of Chancery Lane, in the year 1618.  His mother, by the interest of her friends, procured him to be admitted a King’s scholar in Westminster school[1]; his early inclination to poetry was occasioned by reading accidentally Spencer’s Fairy Queen, which, as he himself gives an account, ’used to lye in his mother’s parlour, he knew not by what accident, for she read no books but those of devotion; the knights, giants, and monsters filled his imagination; he read the whole over before he was 12 years old, and was made a poet, as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.’

In the 16th year of his age, being still at Westminster school, he published a collection of poems, under the title of Poetical Blossoms, in which there are many things that bespeak a ripened genius, and a wit, rather manly than puerile.  Mr. Cowley himself has given us a specimen in the latter end of an ode written when he was but 13 years of age.  ’The beginning of it, says he, is boyish, but of this part which I here set down, if a very little were corrected, I should not be much ashamed of it.’  It is indeed so much superior to what might be expected from one of his years, that we shall satisfy the reader’s curiosity by inserting it here.