ished by Dryden,

The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed.

Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his
pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was
thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of
love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the
metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much
dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into
English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the
_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed
the exiled court to France.

Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers--Carew, Waller,
Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others--gallant courtiers and
officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their
strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's
service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs--_To
Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which occur the lines,

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more--

and to _Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy,
majesty, and glories" of his king, and declares that "stone-walls do not
a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was Sir
John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised
a troop of horse for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament and
fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of
gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite
_Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of
the same stamp--graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling. Carew,
however, showed a nicer sense of form than most of the fantastic school.
Some of his love songs are written with delicate art. There are noble
lines in his elegy on Donne and in one passage of his masque _Coelum
Britannicum_. In his poem entitled _The Rapture_ great splendor of
language and imagery is devoted to the service of an unbridled
sensuality. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of
two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and _On a
Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth, correct manner of writing
in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantly
rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers. In such
verses as Carew's _Encouragemen