Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I
cannot refuse myself the four next lines:


Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,
And bid it to put on;
For long though cheerful is the way,
And life, alas! allows but one ill winter's day.


In the same ode, celebrating the power of the Muse, he gives her
prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events
hatching in futurity; but, once having an egg in his mind, he cannot
forbear to show us that he knows what an egg contains:


Thou into the close nests of Time dost peep,
And there with piercing eye
Through the firm shell and the thick white float spy
Years to come a-forming lie,
Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.


The same thought is more generally, and therefore more poetically
expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and
faults of Cowley: