Aspice quam variis distringar, Lesbia, curis!
Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:
Sum Nilus, sumque Aetna simul; restringite flammas
O lacrimae, aut lacrimas ebibe, flamma, meas.

One of the severe theologians of that time censured him, as having
published "a book of profane and lascivious verses." From the charge of
profaneness, the constant tenour of his life, which seems to have been
eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which
discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the
accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will
sufficiently evince.

Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction: she "plays round the head,
but reaches not the heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness and
cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of
emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of
flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions
are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire
by a philosophical rhymer, who had only heard of another sex; for they
turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman
but as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and
sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always
condemn as unnatural.

The Pindarique odes are now to be considered; a species of composition,
which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in "his list of the
lost inventions of antiquity," and which he has made a bold and vigorous
attempt to recover.