This page has been validated.
COWLEY.
57
assigned it; that of judging, not of things revealed, but of the reality of revelation. In the verses for Reason is a passage which Bentley, in the only English verses which he is known to have written, seems to have copied, though with the inferiority of an imitator.
The holy Book like the eighth sphere doth shine
With thousand lights of truth divine,
So numberless the stars that to our eye
It makes all but one galaxy:
Yet Reason must assist too; for in seas
So vast and dangerous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.
With thousand lights of truth divine,
So numberless the stars that to our eye
It makes all but one galaxy:
Yet Reason must assist too; for in seas
So vast and dangerous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.
After this says Bentley.[1]
Who travels in religious jars,
Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays,
Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,
In ocean wide or sinks or strays.
Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays,
Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,
In ocean wide or sinks or strays.
Cowley seems to have had, what Milton is believed to have wanted, the skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has therefore closed his Miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw,
- ↑ Dodsley's Collection of Poems, vol. V.R.
which
