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. Take this one instance -

"Like some fair pine o'erlooking all the ignobler wood."

If Cowley's delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and he
surely had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrine
would have taken its own place as an important line of English
metre, more mobile than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramatic
poetry, but a line liberally lyrical. It would have been the
light, pursuing wave that runs suddenly, outrunning twenty, further
up the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longer
impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath,
more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowley
left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his
example had been followed, English prosody would have had in this a
valuable bequest.

Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard