William Harvey. In the Crashaw
ode, and in the Hymn to the Light, Cowley is, at last, tender. But
it cannot be said that his love-poems had tenderness. Be wrote in
a gay language, but added nothing to its gaiety. He wrote the
language of love, and left it cooler than he found it. What the
conceits of Lovelace and the rest-- flagrant, not frigid--did not
do was done by Cowley's quenching breath; the language of love
began to lose by him. But even then, even then, who could have
foretold what the loss at a later day would be!
HYMN TO THE LIGHT
It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should show
Cowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two
lines. For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used)
the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separate
unit of metre. He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at least
he first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroic
verse; and after him Dryden took possession and then Pope. But
both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in the
French manner, divided. Cowley, however, with admirable art, is
able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of his
line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the
speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any
lingering.
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