It is of the Cathedral, as thus renovated, that Sir John Denham speaks in the following passage of his Cooper's Hill:--
"That sacred pile, so vast, so high, That whether it's a part of earth or sky, Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud; Paul's, the late name of such a muse whose flight Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height; Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or fire, Or zeal, more fierce than they, thy fall conspire, Secure, whilst thee the best of poets sings, Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings."
"The best of poets" is his brother courtier Waller, who had some time before written his verses "Upon his Majesty's repairing of St. Paul's," in which he compares King Charles, for his regeneration of the Cathedral, to Amphion and other "antique minstrels," who were said to have achieved architectural feats by the power of music, and who, he says,
"Sure were Charles-like kings, Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings; On which with so divine a hand they strook, Consent of motion from their breath they took."
Jones's first labour, the removal of the various foreign encumbrances that had so long oppressed and deformed the venerable edifice, Waller commemorates by a pair of references to St. Paul's history, not unhappily applied: he says the whole nation had combined with his Majesty
"to grace The Gentiles' great Apostle, and deface Those state-obscuring sheds, that like a chain Seem'd to confine and fetter him again; Which the glad Saint shakes off at his command, As once the viper from his sacred hand."
Denham's prediction did no credit to the prophetic reputation of poetry. Of the fabric which was to be unassailable by zeal or fire the poet himself lived to see the ruin, begun by the one and completed by the other; and he himself, curiously enough, a short time before his death, was engaged as the King's surveyor-general in (nominally at least) presiding over the erection of the new Cathedral--the successor of the "sacred pile," of which he had thus sung the immortality.