found it necessary to re-punctuate generally.


WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS


This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown
together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom
with it. I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas
that repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious.


ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW


This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that,
better known, On the Death of Mr. 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