The calm spirit of Cowley's "Essays" was in all his life. As he
tells us in his Essay "On Myself," even when he was a very young boy
at school, instead of running about on holidays and playing with his
fellows, he was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields,
either alone with a book or with some one companion, if he could
find any of the same temper. He wrote verse when very young, and
says, "I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled
my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left
ringing there; for I remember when I began to read and to take some
pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know
not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any
book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works."
The delight in Spenser wakened all the music in him, and in 1628, in
his tenth year, he wrote a "Tragical Historie of Pyramus and
Thisbe."
In his twelfth year Cowley wrote another piece, also in sixteen
stanzas, with songs interspersed, which was placed first in the
little volume of Poetical Blossoms, by A. C., published in 1633.
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