OF OBSCURITY.
Nam neque divitibus contingunt gaudia solis,
Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit.
God made not pleasures only for the rich,
Nor have those men without their share too lived,
Who both in life and death the world deceived.
This seems a strange sentence thus literally translated, and looks as if it were in vindication of the men of business (for who else can deceive the world?) whereas it is in commendation of those who live and die so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them. This Horace calls deceiving the world, and in another place uses the same phrase.
Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitæ.
The secret tracks of the deceiving life.
It is very elegant in Latin, but our English word will hardly bear up to that sense, and therefore Mr. Broome translates it very well:
Or from a life, led as it were by stealth.
Yet we say in our language, a thing deceives our sight, when it passes before us unperceived, and we may say well enough out of the same author:
Sometimes with sleep, sometimes with wine we strive
The cares of life and troubles to deceive.
But that is not to deceive the world, but to deceive ourselves, as Quintilian says, Vitam fallere, To draw on still, and amuse, and deceive our life, till it be advanced insensibly to the fatal period, and fall into that pit which Nature hath prepared for it. The meaning of all this is no more than that most vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which, if it be a truth, the world, I’ll swear, is sufficiently deceived. For my part, I think it is, and that the pleasantest condition of life, is in incognito. What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving and from paying all kind of ceremonies? It is in my mind a very delightful pastime, for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage, Venus herself
A veil of thickened air around them cast,
That none might know, or see them as they passed.
The common story of Demosthenes’s confession that he had taken great pleasure in hearing of a Tanker-woman say as he passed, “This is that Demosthenes,” is wonderful ridiculous from so solid an orator. I myself have often met with that temptation to vanity (if it were any), but am so far from finding it any pleasure, that it only makes me run faster from the place, till I get, as it were, out of sight shot. Democritus relates, and in such a manner, as if he gloried in the good fortune and commodity of it, that when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus: after whose death, making in one of his letters a kind commemoration of the happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last, that he thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life, that in the midst of the most talked of and talking country in the world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without being heard of. And yet within a very few years afterward, there were no two names of men more known or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time: we expose our life to a Quotidian Ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight, and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in that. Whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman more than the Lord Chief Justice of a city. Every creature has it both of nature and art if it be any ways extraordinary. It was as often said, “This is that Bucephalus,” or, “This is that Incitatus,” when they were led prancing through the streets, as “This is that Alexander,” or, “This is that Domitian”; and truly for the latter, I take Incitatus to have been a much more honourable beast than his master, and more deserving the consulship than he the empire. I love and commend a true good fame, because it is the shadow of virtue; not that it doth any good to the body which it accompanies, but ’tis an efficacious shadow, and like that of St. Peter cures the diseases of others. The best kind of glory, no doubt, is that which is reflected from honesty, such as was the glory of Cato and Aristides, but it was harmful to them both, and is seldom beneficial to any man whilst he lives; what it is to him after his death, I cannot say, because I love not philosophy merely notional and conjectural, and no man who has made the experiment has been so kind as to come back to inform us. Upon the whole matter, I account a person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce in the world besides; who is esteemed well enough by his few neighbours that know him, and is truly irreproachable by anybody; and so after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniences of old age, goes more silently out of it than he came in (for I would not have him so much as cry in the exit); this innocent deceiver of the word, as Horace calls him, this Muta Persona, I take to have been more happy in his part, than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise, nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce very well.
Seneca, ex Thyeste,
Act 2. Chor.
Stet quicunque volet, potens,
Aulæ culmine lubrico; etc.
Upon the slippery tops of human state,
The gilded pinnacles of fate,
Let others proudly stand, and for a while,
The giddy danger to beguile,
With joy and with disdain look down on all,
Till their heads turn, and down they fall.
Me, O ye gods, on earth, or else so near
That I no fall to earth may fear,
And, O ye gods, at a good distance seat
From the long ruins of the great!
Here wrapped in the arms of quiet let me lie,
Quiet, companion of obscurity.
Here let my life, with as much silence slide,
As time that measures it does glide.
Nor let the breath of infamy or fame,
From town to town echo about my name;
Nor let my homely death embroidered be
With scutcheon or with elegy.
An old plebeian let me die,
Alas, all then are such, as well as I.
To him, alas, to him, I fear,
The face of death will terrible appear;
Who in his life, flattering his senseless pride
By being known to all the world beside,
Does not himself, when he is dying, know;
Nor what he is, nor whither he’s to go.
Other works by Abraham Cowley:
Some works by other baroque authors
- Mediocrity in Love Rejected by Thomas Carew
- Lips and Eyes. by Thomas Carew
- Know, Celia, Since Thou Art So Proud by Thomas Carew
- Ingrateful Beauty Threatened by Thomas Carew
- I Do Not Love Thee For That Fair by Thomas Carew
- He That Loves A Rosy Cheek by Thomas Carew
- Epitaph On the Lady Mary Villiers by Thomas Carew
- Epitaph for Maria Wentworth by Thomas Carew
- Disdain Returned by Thomas Carew
- Celia Beeding, To the Surgeon by Thomas Carew
- Boldness in Love by Thomas Carew
- Ask Me No More by Thomas Carew
- Another by Thomas Carew
- An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. John by Thomas Carew
- A Song: When June is Past, the Fading Rose by Thomas Carew
- A Song by Thomas Carew
- A prayer to the Wind by Thomas Carew
- A Divine Mistress by Thomas Carew
- A Cruel Mistress. by Thomas Carew
- To His Love When He Had Obtained Her by Sir Walter Raleigh
- To a Lady with an Unruly and Ill-mannered Dog Who Bit several Persons of Importance by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Silent Lover ii by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Silent Lover i by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Lie by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Conclusion by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Artist by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Stans Puer ad Mensam by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Song of Myself by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Sestina Otiosa by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Now What Is Love by Sir Walter Raleigh
- On Being Challenged to Write an Epigram in the Manner of Herrick by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Nature that Washed Her Hands in Milk by Sir Walter Raleigh
- My Last Will by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Like Truthless Dreams, So Are My Joys Expired by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Life by Sir Walter Raleigh
- His Pilgrimage by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Her Reply by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Farewell to the Court by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Epitaph by Sir Walter Raleigh
- A Literature Lesson. Sir Patrick Spens in the Eighteenth Century Manner by Sir Walter Raleigh
- A Farewell to False Love by Sir Walter Raleigh
- The Paint-Kings by Washington Allston
- Rosalie by Washington Allston
- On The Luxembourg Gallery by Washington Allston
- Eccentricity by Washington Allston
- Art by Washington Allston
- America To Great Britain by Washington Allston
- Love Compared To A Game Of Tables by William Strode
- Keepe On Your Maske (Version for his Mistress) by William Strode
Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), the Royalist Poet.Poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile, serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside. He is buried at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Cowley is a wonderful poet and an outstanding representative of the English baroque.