Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley. Samuel Johnson

in his breast canst tame

      With that snow which unmelted lies on thine.

      He seldom indeed fetches an amorous sentiment from the depths of science; his thoughts are for the most part easily understood, and his images such as the superfices of nature readily supplies; he has a just claim to popularity, because he writes to common degrees of knowledge; and is free at least from philosophical pedantry, unless perhaps the end of a song to the Sun may be excepted, in which he is too much a Copernican.  To which may be added the simile of the “palm” in the verses “on her passing through a crowd;” and a line in a more serious poem on the Restoration, about vipers and treacle, which can only be understood by those who happen to know the composition of the Theriaca.

      His thoughts are sometimes hyperbolical and his images unnatural

         The plants admire,

      No less than those of old did Orpheus’ lyre;

      If she sit down, with tops all tow’rds her bow’d,

      They round about her into arbours crowd;

      Or if she walks, in even ranks they stand,

      Like some well-marshall’d and obsequious band.

      In another place:

      While in the park I sing, the listening deer

      Attend my passion, and forget to fear:

      When to the beeches I report my flame,

      They bow their heads, as if they felt the same.

      To gods appealing, when I reach their bowers

      With loud complaints they answer me in showers.

      To thee a wild and cruel soul is given,

      More deaf than trees, and prouder than the Heaven!

      On the head of a stag:

      O fertile head! which every year

      Could such a crop of wonder bear!

      The teeming earth did never bring,

      So soon, so hard, so large a thing:

      Which might it never have been cast,

      Each year’s growth added to the last,

      These lofty branches had supplied

      The earth’s bold sons’ prodigious pride:

      Heaven with these engines had been scaled,

      When mountains heap’d on mountains fail’d.

      Sometimes having succeeded in the first part, he makes a feeble conclusion.  In the song of “Sacharissa’s and Amoret’s Friendship,” the two last stanzas ought to have been omitted.

      His images of gallantry are not always in the highest degree delicate.

      Then shall my love this doubt displace

         And gain such trust that I may come

      And banquet sometimes on thy face,

         But make my constant meals at home.

      Some applications may be thought too remote and unconsequential; as in the verses on the Lady Dancing:

         The sun in figures such as these

      Joys with the moon to play:

         To the sweet strains they advance,

      Which do result from their own spheres;

         As this nymph’s dance

      Moves with the numbers which she hears.

      Sometimes a thought, which might perhaps fill a distich, is expanded and attenuated till it grows weak and almost evanescent.

      Chloris! since first our calm of peace

         Was frighted hence, this good we find,

      Your favours with your fears increase,

         And growing mischiefs make you kind.

      So the fair tree, which still preserves

         Her fruit, and state, while no wind blows,

      In storms from that uprightness swerves;

         And the glad earth about her strows

         With treasure from her yielding boughs.

      His images are not always distinct; as in the following passage, he confounds Love as a person with Love as a passion:

      Some other nymphs, with colours faint,

      And pencil slow, may Cupid paint,

      And a weak heart in time destroy;

      She has a stamp, and prints the boy;

      Can, with a single look, inflame

      The coldest breast, the rudest tame.

      His sallies of casual flattery are sometimes elegant and happy, as that in return for the Silver Pen; and sometimes empty and trifling, as that upon the Card torn by the Queen.  There are a few lines written in the Duchess’s Tasso, which he is said by Fenton to have kept a summer under correction.  It happened to Waller, as to others, that his success was not always in proportion to his labour.

      Of these pretty compositions, neither the beauties nor the faults deserve much attention.  The amorous verses have this to recommend them, that they are less hyperbolical than those of some other poets.  Waller is not always at the last gasp; he does not die of a frown, nor live upon a smile.  There is, however, too much love, and too many trifles.  Little things are made too important: and the Empire of Beauty is represented as exerting its influence further than can be allowed by the multiplicity of human passions, and the variety of human wants.  Such books, therefore, may be considered as showing the world under a false appearance, and, so far as they obtain credit from the young and unexperienced, as misleading expectation, and misguiding practice.

      Of his nobler and more weighty performances, the greater part is panegyrical: for of praise he was very lavish, as is observed by his imitator, Lord Lansdowne:

      No satyr stalks within the hallow’d ground,

      But queens and heroines, kings and gods abound;

      Glory and arms and love are all the sound.

      In the first poem, on the danger of the prince on the coast of Spain, there is a puerile and ridiculous mention of Arion at the beginning; and the last paragraph, on the cable, is in part ridiculously mean, and in part ridiculously tumid.  The poem, however, is such as may be justly praised, without much allowance for the state of our poetry and language at that time.

      The two next poems are upon the king’s behaviour at the death of Buckingham, and upon his Navy.

      He has, in the first, used the pagan deities with great propriety:

      ’Twas want of such a precedent as this

      Made the old heathens frame their gods amiss.

      In the poem on the Navy, those lines are very noble which suppose the king’s power secure against a second deluge; so noble, that it were almost criminal to remark the mistake of “centre” for “surface,” or to say that the empire of the sea would be worth little if it were not that the waters terminate in land.

      The poem upon Sallee has forcible sentiments; but the conclusion is feeble.  That on the Repairs of St. Paul’s has something vulgar and obvious; such as the mention of Amphion; and something violent and harsh: as,

      So all our minds with his conspire to grace

      The Gentiles’ great apostle and deface

      Those state obscuring sheds, that like a chain

      Seem’d to confine, and fetter him again:

      Which the glad saint shakes off at his command,

      As