Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

Not more than one or two are good throughout but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. These three poems of considerable size and some smaller ones were collected in 1633 and publiAbraham Cowleyd in a volume entitled Poetical Blossoms dedicated to the head master of the school and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows. Here he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility and wrote in his thirteenth year the Elegy on the Death of Dudley Lord Carlton.

Abraham Cowley (/ˈkuːli/; 1618 – 28 July 1667) was an English poet born in the City of London late in 1618.