INTRODUCTION xlvii 



elaborate treatise in the Virgilian manner upon Botany 

 and the Physic Garden ; it was indeed Cowley's 

 contribution to the Literature of Medicine. It is 

 interesting as the forerunner of Erasmus Darwin's 

 " Botanical Garden " l and Goethe's " Metamorphosis 

 of Plants," - to name only two of the more famous 

 attempts to poetise the science of Botany. We quote 

 Cowley's own pharmaceutical metaphor : " The two 

 little Books" (subsequently expanded into six) "are 

 offer'd as small Pills made up of sundry Herbs, 

 and gilt with a certain brightness of Style ; he does 

 not desire to press out their Liquor crude in a simple 

 enumeration, but as it were in a Limbeck by the 

 gende Heat of Poetry to distil and extract their 

 Spirits." 



As I have said so much about this poem, it is per- 

 haps only fair to Cowley and to the reader, to give 

 a specimen of it ; and I take his comparison of a 

 Walnut with the Brain-pan of a man, as typical 

 alike of the ingenuity of Cowley, of the medical 

 tendency of the poem, and of the treatment of his 



1 It is curious that Krause, when discussing the genesis 

 and predecessors of Darwin's poem, omits all mention of 

 Cowley's, which had strong affinity with it. 



2 So admirably translated by Professor Blackie in his 

 "Wisdom of Goethe." 



