And with potatoes fat their wanton swine;
Nature these cates with such a lavish hand
Pours out among them, that our coarser land
Tastes of that bounty, and does cloth return,
Which not for warmth but ornament is worn;
For the kind spring which but salutes us here,
Inhabits there and courts them all the year;
Ripe fruits and blossoms on the same trees live,
At once they promise what at once they give;
So sweet the air, so moderate the clime,
None sickly lives or dies before his time;
Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst
To show how all things were created first.
The tardy plants in our cold orchards placed
Reserve their fruits for the next age's taste,
There a small grain in some few months will be
A firm, a lofty and a spacious tree;
The Palma Christi and the fair Papaw,
Now but a seed, preventing nature's law,
In half the circle of the hasty year
Project a shade, and lovely fruits do wear;
And as their trees in our dull region set
But faintly grow and no perfection get,
So in this northern tract our hoarser throats
Utter unripe and ill-constrainèd notes,
Where, the supporter of the poet's style,
Phoebus on them eternally does smile.
O how I long my careless limbs to lay
Under the plantain's shade, and all the day
With amorous airs my fancy entertain,

Invoke the Muses, and improve my vein !

No passion there in my free breast should move, None but the sweetest, best of passions, love!

There while I sing, if gentle Love be by,

That tunes my lute, and winds the strings so high;

With the sweet sound of Sacharissa's name,

I'll make the listening savages grow tame :—

But while I do these pleasing dreams indite,

I am diverted from the promised fight.

SIR JOHN DENHAM.

[SIR JOHN DENHAM was born in Dublin in 1615. He took a prominent part in public affairs, acting for the King in several capacities; and after many vicissitudes of fortune he died at Whitehall on the 10th of April, 1668. He published The Sophy, a tragedy, in 1641, and Cooper's Hill, anonymously, in the same year.]

Denham was the first writer to adopt the precise manner of versification introduced by Waller. His relation to that poet resembles that taken a century later by Mason with respect to Gray, but Denham is a more original writer than Mason. The names of Waller and Denham were first associated by Dryden, and the critics of the next sixty years were unanimous in eulogizing the sweetness of the one, and the strength of the other. It is quite true that the versification of Denham is vigorous; it proceeds with greater volume than that of Waller, and produces a stronger impression. But he is a very unequal and irregular writer, and not unfrequently descends to doggerel, and very dull doggerel too. His literary taste was superior to his genius; he knew what effect he desired to produce, and strove to conquer the difficulties of antithesis, but the result of his effort was rarely classic. He takes the same place in English poetry as is taken in French by Chapelain and other hard versifiers of the beginning of the seventeenth century, who had lost the romantic fervour and had not yet gained the classic grace. But, like those poets, he has his fine flashes of style.

The works of Denham are small in extent. They consist of The Sophy, a languid tragedy of Turkish misrule; Cooper's Hill, a topographical poem, The Destruction of Troy, an insignificant paraphrase of part of the Eneid; and a selection of miscellaneous pieces. These latter, and Cooper's Hill, are all that need attract critical attention. The reputation of the last-mentioned poem rests almost entirely upon its famous quatrain :

'O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.'

It is a curious fact that this exquisite apostrophe, which is one of the gems of our language, does not occur in the first edition of Cooper's Hill. There are no other lines in that poem which approach these in elegance and force, and it occurs to the mind of the present writer that they may possibly have been contributed by Waller. This, however, is unlikely, and it would be unfair, without shadow of proof, to deprive Denham of his chief claim to immortality. The two passages we select give the reader a fair idea of the general manner of this poem, which has certainly been over-praised. The style is obscure and the wit laboured, while it probably contains more errors against the rules of grammar than any other poem in the language; but Denham is at all times a singularly ungrammatical writer. Of his other long poems, by far the best is the Elegy on Cowley, which was written but a very few months before his own death, and after a long attack of insanity. In this poem he is brighter and more easy than in any other long composition, and it contains some interesting critical matter. Denham was highly esteemed for his comical vein, and his lampoons are not devoid of wit, though incredibly brutal and coarse. He is very unlike the amorous poets of his age in this, that he has left behind him not one copy of love-verses; and his best poem is written in dispraise of love. Among the royalist lyrists there is but one, Cleveland, who forms a connecting link between Denham and the old lyric school. His satires and squibs are closely allied to those of Cleveland, and he has something of the same cynical and defiant attitude of mind. He adored literature with the worship of one who practises it late in life, and without much ease; his conception of the ideal dignity of the poet's function contrasts oddly with the indecorous matter that he puts forth as comic poetry. There was nothing about him very original, for Cooper's Hill, which was destined to inspire Windsor Forest, had been itself preceded by Ben Jonson's Penshurst. But he forms an important link in the chain of transition, and ranks chronologically second among our Augustan poets.

EDMUND W. GOSSE.

VIEW OF LONDON FROM COOPER'S HILL.

Through untraced ways and airy paths I fly,
More boundless in my fancy than my eye,—
My eye, which swift as thought contracts the space
That lies between, and first salutes the place
Crowned with that sacred pile, so vast, so high,
That whether 'tis a part of earth or sky
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain or descending cloud,-
Paul's, the late theme of such a Muse whose flight
Has bravely reached and soared above thy height;
Now shalt thou stand, though sword or time or fire,
Or zeal more fierce than they, thy fall conspire,
Secure, while thee the best of poets sings,
Preserved from ruin by the best of kings.
Under his proud survey the city lies,

And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise,

Whose state and wealth, the business and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a darker cloud,

And is to him who rightly things esteems
No other in effect but what it seems,

Where, with like haste, though several ways, they run,
Some to undo, and some to be undone;

While luxury and wealth, like war and peace,

Are each the other's ruin and increase;

As rivers lost in seas some secret vein
Thence reconveys, there to be lost again.
O happiness of sweet retired content!
To be at once secure and innocent!

PRAISE OF THE THAMES.

[From Cooper's Hill.]

My eye, descending from the hill, surveys
Where Thames amongst the wanton valleys strays;
Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean's sons,
By his old sire to his embraces runs,

Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,

Like mortal life to meet eternity;

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold,
His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore,
O'er which he kindly spreads his spacious wing,
And hatches plenty for th' ensuing spring;
Nor then destroys it with too fond a stay,
Like mothers which their infants overlay,
Nor, with a sudden and impetuous wave,
Like profuse kings, resumes the wealth he gave ;
No unexpected inundations spoil

The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil,
But godlike his unwearied bounty flows,

First loves to do, then loves the good he does ;
Nor are his blessings to his banks confined,
But free and common as the sea or wind;
When he to boast or to disperse his stores,
Full of the tributes of his grateful shores,
Visits the world, and in his flying towers,

Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours,
Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants;
So that to us no thing, no place is strange,
While his fair bosom is the world's exchange.

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.