Born, at Great Berkhamstead Rectory, 15 Nov. 1731. At a school in Market Street, Herts, 1737–39. Under the care of an oculist, 1739–41. At Westminster School, 1741–49. Student at Middle Temple, 29 April 1748. Articled to a solicitor for three years, 1750. Called to Bar, 14 June 1754. Depression of mind began. Commissioner of Bankrupts, 1759–65. Contrib. nos. 111, 115, 134, 139 to “The Connoisseur,” 1756; to Duncombe’s “Translations from Horace,” 1756–57; to “The St. James’s Chronicle,” 1761. Symptoms of insanity began to appear; taken to a private asylum at St. Albans, Dec. 1763. Left there and settled in Huntingdon, June 1765. Began to board in house of Mr. and Mrs. Unwin there, Nov. 1765. Removed with Mrs. Unwin and family to Olney, Bucks, autumn of 1767. Assisted John Newton, curate of Olney, in parochial duties. Fresh attack of insanity, 1773–74. On recovery, showed more activity in literary work. Friendship with Lady Austen, 1781–83. Contrib. to “Gentleman’s Mag.,” June 1784 and Aug. 1785. Removed from Olney to Weston, Nov. 1786. Attack of insanity, 1787. Contrib. to “Analytical Review,” Feb. 1789. Crown pension of £300 a year granted, 1794. Visited various places in Norfolk with Mrs. Unwin, summer of 1795. Settled in Dereham Lodge, Oct. 1795. Died there, 25 April 1800. Buried in Dereham Church. Works: “Olney Hymns” (anon., with J. Newton), 1779; “Anti-Thelyphthora” (anon.), 1781; “Poems,” 1782; “John Gilpin” (anon.), 1783; “The Task,” 1785 (the fly-leaf bears the words: “Poems…. Vol. II.”); Translation of “Iliad and Odyssey,” 1791; “Poems” (“On the receipt of my mother’s picture”—“The Dog and the Water Lily”), 1798. Posthumous: “Adelphi,” 1802; “Life and Posthumous Writings,” ed. by Hayley, 1803 (2nd edn., 1804; 3rd, entitled “Life and Letters,” 1809); “Memoir of the early life of William Cowper” (autobiographical), 1816; “Table Talk,” 1817; “Hymns,” 1822; “Private Correspondence” (2 vols.), 1824; “Poems, the early productions of W. Cowper,” ed. by J. Croft, 1825; “Minor Poems,” 1825; “The Negro’s Complaint,” 1826. He translated: “Homer,” 1791; “The Power of Grace,” by Van Lier, 1792; “Poems by Mme. De la Motte Guion” (posth.), 1801; Milton’s Latin and Italian poems (posth.), 1808. Collected Works: ed. by Newton (10 vols.), 1817; ed. by Memes (3 vols.), 1834; ed. by Grimshawe (8 vols.), 1835; ed. by Southey (15 vols.), 1836–37. Life: by Hayley, 1803; by Bruce, in Aldine edn. of Works, 1865; by Benham, in Globe edn. of Works, 1870.

Personal

  The morning is my writing time, and in the morning I have no spirits. So much the worse for my correspondents. Sleep, that refreshes my body, seems to cripple me in every other respect. As the evening approaches, I grow more alert, and when I am retiring to bed, am more fit for mental occupation than at any other time. So it fares with us whom they call nervous. By a strange inversion of the animal economy, we are ready to sleep when we have most need to be awake, and go to bed just when we might sit up to some purpose. The watch is irregularly wound up, it goes in the night when it is not wanted, and in the day stands still.

	IN MEMORY
	OF WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ.
	BORN IN HERTFORDSHIRE, 1731.
	BURIED IN THIS CHURCH, 1800.
	Ye, who with warmth the public triumph feel
	Of talents, dignified by sacred zeal,
	Here, to devotion’s Bard devoutly just,
	Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper’s dust!
	England, exulting in his spotless fame,
	Ranks with her dearest sons his fav’rite name;
	Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise
	So clear a title to affection’s praise:
	His highest honors to the heart belong;
	His virtues form’d the magic of his song.

  From his figure, as it first appeared to me, in his sixty-second year, I should imagine that he must have been very comely in his youth; and little had time injured his countenance, since his features expressed, in that period of life, all the powers of his mind, and all the sensibility of his heart. He was of a middle stature, rather strong than delicate in the form of his limbs: the colour of his hair was a light brown, that of his eyes a bluish, and his complexion ruddy. In his dress he was neat, but not finical; in his diet temperate and not dainty. He had an air of pensive reserve in his deportment, and his extreme shyness sometimes produced in his manners an indescribable mixture of awkwardness and dignity; but no being could be more truly graceful when he was in perfect health and perfectly pleased with his society. Towards women, in particular, his behaviour and conversation was delicate and fascinating in the highest degree.

  It appears to the present writer, from a careful perusal of that instructive piece of biography published by Mr. Hayley, that Cowper, from his infancy, had a tendency to errations of the mind; and without admitting this fact in some degree, it must seem extremely improbable that the mere dread of appearing as a reader in the house of lords should have brought on his first settled fit of lunacy. Much, indeed, has been said of his uncommon shyness and diffidence, and more, perhaps, than the history of his early life will justify. Shyness and diffidence are common to all young persons who have not been early introduced into company, and Cowper, who had not, perhaps, that advantage at home, might have continued to be shy when other boys are forward. But had his mind been, even in this early period, in a healthful state, he must have gradually assumed the free manners of an ingenuous youth, conscious of no unusual imperfection that should keep him back. At school, we are told, he was trampled upon by the ruder boys who took advantage of his weakness, yet we find that he mixed in their amusements, which must in some degree have advanced him on a level with them: and what is yet more extraordinary, we find him associating with men of more gaiety than pure morality admits, and sporting with the utmost vivacity and wildness with Thurlow and others, when it was natural to expect that he would have been glad to court solitude for the purposes of study, as well as for the indulgence of his habitual shyness, if, indeed, at this period it was so habitual as we are taught to believe.

  I could have wished a stronger tone of severity to have been expressed, in the authority last referred to, against the publication of those “Memoirs of Cowper,” 1816, 8vo., which were written by himself, and which betrayed his morbid and unhappy state of feelings in an attempt to commit suicide. There is perhaps no species of mental depravation, connected with a lust of lucre, more deserving of reproof and castigation, than that which led to the publication of these Memoirs. First, this composition could never have been intended for the public eye; and was therefore on every account sacred. Secondly, it could only lead to the debasement of that amiable creature, whom it was the bounden duty of the publisher to have kept as free from all imputation as the pages of Hayley had justly represented him. Thirdly, if the feeling which lead to this publication were a religious one, I must say that it is one of the most perverted and mischievous views of religion with which I am acquainted. Cant, or lucre, in its genuine form, was, I fear, the source or the motive of this highly injudicious publication. We love and respect Cowper too sincerely, to “drag his frailties from their drear abode.”

  Had Cowper’s mind been sane, no rational views of religion could unquestionably have produced the hallucination; but when his mind was clouded with hypochondria, as in early life before it had taken any definite form, nothing was wanting to convert his melancholy into monomania, and to change the wandering reveries of the former into the settled gloom of the latter, but the exclusive application of enthusiasm to a single subject…. Cowper, from his earliest years, was delicate in constitution, and timid in his disposition. Excessive application to professional studies in the Temple increased the delicacy of his health, the nervous system and the cerebral organs became disturbed or disordered in their functions, and his natural timidity merged into a morbid sensibility which wholly disqualified him for the active duties of that profession in which he had been so improperly placed.

  His prevailing insanity, so far as it could be called insanity at all, in those long intervals of many years, during which his mind was serene and active, his habit of thought playful, and his affections more and more fervent, was simply the exclusion of a personal religious hope to such a degree as to seem like habitual despair. This despair was his insanity, for it could be only madness that could produce it, after such a revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ as he had been permitted in the outset to enjoy. If Paul had gone deranged after being let down from his trance and vision in the third heavens, and the type of his derangement had been the despair of ever again beholding his Saviour’s face in glory, and the obstinate belief of being excluded by Divine decree from heaven, though his affections were all the while in heaven, even that derangement would have been scarcely more remarkable than Cowper’s. In the case of so delicate and profound an organization as his, it is very difficult to trace the effect of any entanglement or disturbance from one side or the other between the nervous and mental sensibilities of his frame. There was a set of Border Ruffians continually threatening his peace, endeavoring to set up slavery instead of freedom, and ever and anon making their incursions, and defacing the title-deeds to his inheritance, which they could not carry away; and Cowper might have assured himself with the consolation that those documents would not be destroyed, being registered in heaven, and God as faithful to them, as if their record in his own heart had been always visible.

	O poets! from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing!
	O Christians! at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!
	O men! this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,
	Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!
	And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
	How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,
	And how when one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
	He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted;
	He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,
	And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration:
	Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken;
	Named softly as the household name of one whom God hath taken.

  Here Cowper was fond of coming, and sitting within the hollow boll for hours, around him stretching the old woods, with their solitude and the cries of woodland birds. The fame which he has conferred on this tree has nearly proved its destruction. Whole arms and great pieces of its trunk have been cut away with knife and axe and saw to prepare different articles from. The Marquis of Northampton, to whom the chase belongs, has had multitudes of nails driven in to stop the progress of this destruction, but, finding that not sufficient, has affixed a board bearing this inscription: “Out of respect to the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of Northampton is particularly desirous of preserving this oak. Notice is hereby given that any person defacing or otherwise injuring it will be prosecuted according to law.” In stepping round the Yardley Oak it appeared to me to be, at the foot, about thirteen yards in circumference.

  Few things are more touching than the history of Cowper’s life, as it is related, with more than feminine grace, innocence, and tenderness, in his own inimitable letters; and we can understand the devotedness with which so many of his friends sacrificed their whole existence to cherish and console a being so gifted, so fascinating, and so unhappy. The dim shadow, too, of an early and enduring, but hopeless love, throws over the picture a soft and pensive tint, like moonlight on some calm landscape.

  Words are wanting to describe the sense of relief with which we close this saddest, most mysterious narrative. The man were granite who could refrain from sympathy, amounting to bitter anguish, with this poor unfortunate. And then, there are questions arising out of his story, which descend into the very depths of those awful relations which connect us with God and Eternity. Why did this man suffer thus? Why was he ever born to endure such wretchedness? What the rationale of his long martyrdom and darkness?… Truly William Cowper was still more a marvellous, than he was a mild and gentle spirit,—stronger, even, than he was amiable—a very Prometheus chained to his rock, let us call him,—the rock being his rugged, deep-rooted woe; the chain his lengthened life; and himself the Titan, in his earnestness, lofty purpose, and poetic power.

  His talent is but the picture of his character, and his poems but the echo of his life…. He was one of those to whom women devote themselves, whom they love maternally, first from compassion, then by attraction, because they find in them alone the contrivances, minute and tender attentions, delicate observances which men’s rude nature cannot give them, and which their more sensitive nature nevertheless craves.

  It must have been a disappointment to Cowper that the songs or ballads he wrote on the slave trade, for the express purpose of being sung in the streets, and by that means widely circulated among the people, came to nothing. “If you hear ballads sung in the streets on the hardships of the negroes in the islands,” he writes to Mr. Rose, “they are probably mine.” But Mr. Rose heard them not, nor was the song writer ever to have that satisfaction himself.

  So sad and strange a destiny has never before or since been that of a man of genius. With wit and humour at will, he was nearly all his life plunged in the darkest melancholy. Innocent, pious and confiding, he lived in perpetual dread of everlasting punishment: he could only see between him and heaven a high wall which he despaired of ever being able to scale; yet his intellectual vigour was not subdued by affliction. What he wrote for amusement or relief in the midst of “supreme distress,” surpasses the elaborate efforts of others made under the most favourable circumstances; and in the very winter of his days, his fancy was as fresh and blooming as in the spring and morning of existence. That he was constitutionally prone to melancholy and insanity, seems undoubted; but the predisposing causes were as surely aggravated by his strict and secluded mode of life.

  If Cowper’s retirement was virtuous, it was so because he was actively employed in the exercise of his highest faculties: had he been a mere idler, secluded from his kind, his retirement would not have been virtuous at all. His flight from the world was rendered necessary by his malady, and respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight and not a victory. His misconception was fostered and partly produced by a religion which was essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave birth to characters of the highest and most energetic beneficence, represented salvation too little as the reward of effort, too much as the reward of passive belief and of spiritual emotion.

  The time of William Cowper seems now, so far as Westminster is concerned, equally remote as that of Raleigh. It was in the churchyard of St. Margaret’s, while he was a scholar at Westminster, that he received one of those impressions which had so strong an effect on his after life. Crossing the burial-ground one dark evening, towards his home in the school, he saw the glimmering lantern of a grave-digger at work. He approached to look on, with a boyish craving for horrors, and was struck by a skull heedlessly thrown out of the crowded earth. To the mind of William Cowper such an accident had an extraordinary significance. In after life he remembered it as the occasion of religious emotions not readily suppressed. On the south side of the church, until the recent restorations, there was a stone the inscription of which suggests the less gloomy view of Cowper’s character. It marked “The Burial-Place of Mr. John Gilpin;” the date was not to be made out, but it must have been fresh when Cowper was at school, and it would be absurd to doubt that the future poet had seen it, and perhaps unconsciously adopted from it the name of his hero.

  William Cowper is one of the strangest and most pathetic figures in the literary history of England. He had much in common with another famous writer, and it would be easy to draw a parallel between William Cowper and Charles Lamb. In nothing is the resemblance closer than in the circumstance that both began by writing poetry and produced much sweet verse, while the prose of each is far more noteworthy than his poetry, and is among the best in the language. If neither had written a line or a sentence, the personal story of each would have ensured his name being remembered. Though the career of both was chequered and painful, yet it has a fascination for every reader, and, of the two, Cowper’s is the sadder and the more curious.

  On the 19th of April it was evident that death was near, and Mr. Johnson ventured to speak of his approaching dissolution as the signal for his deliverance from the miseries of both mind and body. Cowper making fewer objections than might have been supposed, Johnson proceeded to say, “that, in the world to which he was hastening, a merciful Redeemer had prepared unspeakable happiness for all His children, and therefore for him.” To the first part of this sentence he listened with composure, but upon hearing the concluding words he passionately entreated that no further observations might be made on the subject. He lingered five days longer. On Thursday he sat up as usual in the evening. In the course of the night, when he was exceedingly exhausted, Miss Perowne offered him some refreshment, which he rejected, saying, “What can it signify?” and these were the last words he was heard to utter. At five in the morning a deadly change had taken place in his features, and he remained in an insensible state from that time till about five in the afternoon, when he ceased to breathe, expiring so peacefully that none who stood at his bedside could tell the precise moment of his departure. From the time of his death till the coffin was closed, Mr. Johnson says, “the expression with which his countenance had settled was that of calmness and composure, mingled, as it were, with holy surprise.”

  Intellectually, Cowper is rendered more difficult in appearance, perhaps, than in reality by his malady. He would probably not have been very different as a perfectly sane man; that is to say, he would have at least shown generous sympathies, pure morality, and, above all things, the instincts and conduct of a gentleman, in the very best sense of the word, without joining to them any very vigorous reasoning power or wide faculty of appreciation. His nature, slightly feminine, must always have been more than slightly prejudiced; but his prejudices sometimes contribute to his poetry, and rarely interfere with it.

  The country has but little changed in the course of a century. The ruins of Capability Brown’s exploits are still traceable at Weston; the square tower of Clifton still looks down upon the spire of Olney; there is still a clump of poplars at Lavendon Mill; there is still a wealth of flowering rushes with their cherry-scented blossoms, of broad-leaved plants varying the monotony of the reeds, of purple loose-strife, of blue forget-me-not. An adventurous holiday-maker, who could for a couple of days forego the delights of dusty roads and the rushing wheel, might find a less agreeable pastime than a voyage in a canoe from Newport Pagnell down to Turvey. Thus he might bathe himself in the atmosphere which was breathed by no mean English poet, gliding beneath hills clothed with trees, or between wide meadows; but he would do well not to surrender himself unguardedly to the calm pleasures of plain-sailing, lest he should rue his error lost in the mazes of a reed-bed.

Mary Unwin

	The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
	Since first our sky was overcast;
	Ah, would that this might be the last!
	My Mary!
	Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
	I see thee daily weaker grow;
	’Twas my distress that brought thee low,
	My Mary!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
	Are still more lovely in my sight
	Than golden beams of orient light,
	My Mary!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Partakers of thy sad decline,
	Thy hands their little force resign;
	Yet, gently prest, press gently mine,
	My Mary!
	*        *        *        *        *
	And should my future lot be cast
	With much resemblance of the past,
	Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
	My Mary!

  I am tedious without being, perhaps, after all, intelligible; but an example may make me so. Mrs. Unwin, the friend of Cowper, felt that the Divine inflictions were mercies, and to be received as such, as sensibly as we feel that the shower, which wets our garment, refreshes the dried-up soil. What we regard, in a speculative way, as a thing we ought to believe, was, with her, like the evidence of the senses, and enabled her to bear the severest evils with unshaken and even cheerful patience. In vain would those, who cherish and brood over sorrow, excuse themselves, by depreciating as a kind of apathy the lively faith which supported this Christian heroine, even under the death of her most excellent and only son. What but sensibility of the purest, highest kind led her to do and suffer, in the cause of friendship, more than ever the courage of man or the love of woman achieved? Dying for one’s friend was nothing to this. Estranged from all social enjoyments, and having one’s sole attention tied down, day after day, and year after year, to the most painful object that heart can conceive—the ghastly form and suspended faculties of a dear friend! What a being must Cowper have been, that could excite such a pure and fervent attachment; and how much beyond the conception of ordinary minds was the tenderness, the constancy, the fortitude, and, above all, the faith of this blessed woman! Lady Hesketh, the good, the generous, and the amiable, tried to fill her place, but sank under it. Miss Fanshawe, who was with Lady H. in the last months of her life, told me that she never recovered the miserable winter she spent with her beloved cousin.

Lady Austen

  He was not a famous poet in those days, but a poor invalid recluse, with a shadow of madness and misery about him, whose story was inevitably known to all his neighbours, and about whom there could be no delusion possible; but though all this is against the theory that a brilliant, lively, charming, and very likely fanciful woman, such as Lady Austen seems to have been, meant to marry him, it is quite enough to explain the compassionate interest rapidly ripening into warm friendship which moved her at first. Men like Cowper are always interesting to women, and there can be little doubt that, in the dull neighborhood of Olney, such company and conversation as his would be a godsend to any visitor from livelier scenes. When the new alliance went so far as to induce her to settle in Olney in the adjoining house, with that famous door in the wall first made to facilitate communications between Newton and Cowper, reopened, a stronger motive is no doubt necessary. But it is a vulgar conclusion that marriage must bethought of wherever a man and woman are concerned, and it was the age for romantic friendships. At all events, whatever was the cause, Lady Austen took up her abode in the deserted vicarage.

  The fact now began to dawn upon his mind that Lady Austen was in love with him. The only wonder is that he did not perceive it before. Nobody can blame her for losing her heart to the poet. She saw only the bright and cheerful side of his character, and knew little or nothing of the canker of despair that gnawed continually at his heart…. As soon as Cowper discovered in what light Lady Austen regarded him, he perceived that matters could no longer go on as they were. The thought of love—anything more than a brotherly and sisterly love—had never entered his mind, for since his last dreadful derangement at the vicarage he had given up all thoughts of marriage (it should be remembered, too, that he was in his fifty-fourth year), and seeing himself called on to renounce either one lady or the other, he felt it to be his bounden duty to cling to Mrs. Unwin, to whose kindness he had been indebted for so many years. It has been said by some that Mrs. Unwin was jealous of Lady Austen. Very likely she was. When we consider how tenderly and patiently she had watched over Cowper in his dark and dreadful hours, how for so many years she had shared his joys and sorrows, and delighted in his companionship, we need not wonder if some feeling akin to jealousy stirred her when she perceived the danger of her place being taken by one who, though more brilliant, could not possibly love him more. But Mrs. Unwin had no need to fear. Cowper’s affections for her, his knowledge of her worth, his gratitude for past services, would not allow him to hesitate. He had hoped that it would be possible to enjoy the friendship of both ladies; but when he discovered that it was necessary to decide between one and the other, he bowed to the painful necessity and wrote Lady Austen “a very tender yet resolute letter, in which he explained and lamented the circumstances that forced him to renounce her society.” She in anger burnt the letter, and henceforth there was no more communication between them.

  The sprightly Muse, with all her stability of temper, sense of religion, and seriousness of mind, must soon have become disagreeably conscious of the difference between the forced attendance of a wayward and irritable invalid with his thoughts elsewhere, and the effusive camaraderie with which he sought her company in the bright days of their first companionship.

	“O Love! it is a pleasant thing
	A little time, while it is new.”

Mrs. Unwin might not have resented the change, but Lady Austen was not Mrs. Unwin, and she “repaired to Bristol.” We might have understood the cause of the separation better if the lady had kept Cowper’s letter of farewell, but she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw it in the fire—tempted, perhaps, for once in her life, to believe that Methodism was cant. Lady Austen was too exacting, or Cowper was too exacting; anyhow, they could not get on together—any explanation you please except that Mrs. Unwin was jealous. To entertain this explanation for a moment is to commit the most senseless outrage on the memory of a gentle, self-denying woman who bore with all the crazy poet’s selfish whims and caprices, and watched over him with more than a mother’s love till her own mind gave way under the strain.

Olney Hymns, 1779

  Precious is his memory to every lover of sacred song.

  Very many of Cowper’s hymns, like passages in his longer poems, have become “household words.”… Cowper—the great Christian poet of England, and, as Willmott justly remarks, pre-eminently the poet of the affections, above any writer in our language—has enriched sacred literature by so many exquisite bursts of poetic inspiration, that it is no easy task to determine which are the best.

  As a hymn-writer, except for one very remarkable composition, Cowper scarcely ranks as high as the Wesleys. He might have taken a much higher place than they—a higher place than almost any writer of hymns of his own time or since—if he could have applied his genius to the work. That was certainly not possible to him at the time when the Olney hymns were written, and at the other periods when it might have been possible he was occupied with greater things. The defect of his hymns was their severe doctrinal character. They are statements of religious belief, for the most part narrow and despondent; and only occasionally, when they reflect what may have been a passing mood of cheerfulness, do they express the aspirations or contentments of simple piety.

  “Hark my Soul” is the most beautiful of all English hymns. It emphasises what is the essence of the Christian faith,—the appeal of Christ to the individual man. It describes in language that is exquisitely simple and true the work of the Saviour for the soul in redemption. In words hardly less powerful than those of St. Paul, it brings home to the heart the truth that He who speaks to us through the Gospel is the fulness of Him who filleth all in all, and then it closes by bringing the poor human heart, conscious of its own feebleness, into its true attitude of absolute reliance on the Divine peace, in which it lives and moves, and has its being.

  “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Cowper’s hymn has helped multitudes to bear up under the blows of apparently adverse fortune. Within a year of the writing of this beautiful and touching hymn, Cowper’s reason reeled, and he endeavoured to commit suicide by drowning in the Ouse. It is some poor consolation to know that his attempt at suicide was not a suicide of despair, but rather the perversion of the spirit of resignation and joyful submission which finds expression in the hymn. Newton says that Cowper tried to take his life, believing it was a sacrifice which God required at his hands. The accepted legend is that he had proposed to commit suicide at a certain place, but as the driver of the postchaise could not find it, he returned home without putting his purpose into execution, and there composed this hymn.

John Gilpin, 1783

  When I received your account of the great celebrity of “John Gilpin,” I felt myself both flattered and grieved. Being man, and having in my composition all the ingredients of which other men are made, and vanity among the rest, it pleased me to reflect that I was on a sudden become so famous, and that all the world was busy inquiring after me; but the next moment, recollecting my former self, and that thirteen years ago, as harmless as John’s history is, I should not then have written it, my spirits sank, and I was ashamed of my success. Your letter was followed the next post by one from Mr. Unwin. You tell me that I am rivalled by Mrs. Bellamy; and he, that I have a competitor for fame, nor less formidable, in the Learned Pig. Alas! what is an author’s popularity worth, in a world that can suffer a prostitute on one side, and a pig on the other, to eclipse his brightest glories? I am therefore sufficiently humbled by these considerations; and unless I should hereafter be ordained to engross the public attention by means more magnificent than a song, am persuaded that I shall suffer no real detriment by their applause. I have produced many things, under the influence of despair, which hope would not have permitted to spring. But if the soil of that melancholy, in which I have walked so long, has thrown up here and there an unprofitable fungus, it is well, at least, that it is not chargeable with having brought forth poison. Like you, I see, or think I can see, that Gilpin may have his use. Causes, in appearance trivial, produce often the most beneficial consequences; and perhaps my volumes may now travel to a distance, which, if they had not been ushered into the world by that notable horseman, they would never have reached.

  The story of John Gilpin has perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as anything of the same length that ever was written.

The Task, 1785

  Is not “The Task” a glorious poem? The religion of “The Task,” bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, is the religion of God and Nature; the religion that exalts and ennobles man.

  The “Task,” beginning with all the peaceful attractions of sportive gaiety, rises to the most solemn and awful grandeur, to the highest strain of religious solemnity. Its frequent variation of tone is masterly in the greatest degree, and the main spell of that inexhaustible enchantment which hurries the reader through a flowery maze of many thousand verses, without allowing him to feel a moment of languor or fatigue. Perhaps no author, ancient or modern, ever possessed, so completely as Cowper, the nice art of passing, by the most delicate transition, from subjects to subjects that might otherwise seem but little or not at all allied to each other, the rare talent

	“Happily to steer
	From grave to gay, from lively to severe.”

  In the “Task” are to be found descriptive powers not inferior to those of Thomson, mingled with a strain of the happiest satiric humour, and interspersed with touches of the most exquisite pathos and sublimity; while the whole inculcates, in versification of unparalleled sweetness and simplicity, the noblest lessons of morality and religion.

  It seems to have been begun without design like a morning’s ramble, and to have been continued and completed without labour. Nevertheless, in this walk how many beautiful and even sublime objects rise upon the view. Cowper appears to bear in his style a very great resemblance to the Roman Ovid. There is in both the same elegance of diction and unstudied easiness of expression. But the Christian poet must be allowed to bear the palm from the Pagan in sentiment if he is equalled by him (which I do not think) in other respects. The pious fervour which goes through the page of Cowper will preserve it from oblivion, while the blasphemous scoffings of a witty infidel, should they pass down to another generation, will be viewed only with mingled indignation and contempt.

  Cowper’s first volume, partly from the grave character of the longer pieces and the purposely rugged, rambling, slip-shod versification, was long neglected, till “The Task,” the noblest effort of his muse, composed under the inspiration of cheerfulness, hope, and love, unbosoming the whole soul of his affections, intelligence, and piety,—at once made our countrymen feel that neither the genius of poesy had fled from our isle, nor had the heart for it died in the breast of its inhabitants. “The Task” was the first long poem from the close of Churchill’s brilliant but evanescent career, that awoke wonder, sympathy, and delight by its own ineffable excellence among the reading people of England.

  Lady Austen has the honor also of having suggested at this time to Cowper the subject of that work which made him the most popular poet of his age, and raised him to a rank in English poetry from which no revolution of taste can detrude him. She had often urged him to try his powers in blank verse: at last he promised to comply with her request, if she would give him a subject. “Oh,” she replied, “you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;—write upon this Sofa!” The answer was made with a woman’s readiness, and the capabilities of such a theme were apprehended by Cowper with a poet’s quickness of perception.

  Where is the poem that surpasses the “Task” in the genuine love it breathes, at once towards inanimate and animate existence—in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation—in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference—in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain?… How Cowper’s exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless tea-pot holding the bit of mignonette that serves to chear the dingy town-lodging with a “hint that Nature lives;” and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large.

  Incomparably the best poem that any Englishman then living had produced—a poem, too, which could hardly fail to excite in a well-constituted mind a feeling of esteem and compassion for the poet, a man of genius and virtue, whose means were scanty, and whom the most cruel of all the calamities incident to humanity had made incapable of supporting himself by vigorous and sustained exertion.

  The great beauties of “The Task,” and its pure and elevated feeling, can hardly be said to make it a poem of the highest class. The very method of its origin was some bar to success…. Towards the end of the First Book he again changes his subject, for the purpose of moralizing. The country and the life therein are contrasted with the town, and this affords the opening for satire, which is just touched in the end of the First Book, but forms the staple for the Second. And splendid satire it is, full of vigour, and energy, and point, sometimes mere good-humoured badinage, sometimes full of burning indignation. It is satire of a different kind from that of his former poems; it is less bilious, more free from personality. Yet, Antæus-like, the author loses all his power when he ceases to touch his proper sphere. His faculty of keen observation enables him to lash effectively the false pretentions and follies which he sees. But his reflections upon the world without are of the poorest kind. He foresees the end of the world close at hand. He rails at the natural philosopher who attempts to discover the causes of physical calamities, such as earthquakes and diseases; at the historian who takes the trouble to investigate the motives of remarkable men; at the geologist and the astronomer. For the last especially there is nothing but contempt.

  Is the kitchen-garden indeed poetical? To-day perhaps; but to-morrow, if my imagination is barren, I shall see there nothing but carrots and other kitchen stuff. It is my sensation which is poetic, which I must respect, as the most precious flower of beauty. Hence a new style…. This is his great poem, “The Task.” If we enter into details, the contrast is greater still. He does not seem to dream that he is being listened to; he only speaks to himself. He does not dwell on his ideas, to set them in relief, and make them stand out by repetitions and antitheses: he marks his sensation and that is all. We follow it in him as it is born, and we see it rising from a former one, swelling, falling, remounting, as we see vapour issuing from a spring, and insensibly rising, unrolling and developing its shifting forms. Thought, which in others was curdled and rigid, becomes here mobile and fluent; the rectilinear verse grows flexible; the noble vocabulary widens its scope to let in vulgar words of conversation and life. At length poetry has again become lifelike; we no longer listen to words, but we feel emotions; it is no longer an author but a man who speaks. His life is there perfect, beneath its black lines, without falsehood or concoction; his whole effort is bent on removing falsehood and concoction.

  There is a wonderful variety of objects and of thought in this poem; it may be called a universal composition, for the poet gathers up all the phenomena of life, nature, and society, and the colours with which he paints the bright and the dark sides of all things are as brilliant as they are true.

  Though Cowper sees the outer world as set off against his own personal moods and the interests of man, yet he does not allow these to discolor his scenes or to blur the exactness of their outlines. Fidelity, absolute veracity, characterize his descriptions. He himself says that he took nothing at second-hand, and all his pictures bear witness to this. Homely, of course, flat, tame, was the country he dwelt in and described. But to this day that Huntingdonshire landscape, and the flats by the sluggish Ouse, in themselves so unbeautiful, acquire a charm to the eye of the traveler from the remembered poetry of the “Task” and for the sake of him who wrote it.

  As “Paradise Lost” is to militant Puritanism, so is “The Task” to the religious movement of its author’s time. To its character as the poem of a sect it no doubt owed and still owes much of its popularity. Not only did it give beautiful and effective expression to the sentiments of a large religious party, but it was about the only poetry that a strict Methodist or Evangelical could read; while to those whose worship was unritualistic and who were debarred by their principles from the theatre and the concert, anything in the way of art that was not illicit must have been eminently welcome.

  It is in the second book, “The Timepiece,” that the poet takes his highest flight. Nothing finer of its kind has ever been written in the English language than the first half-dozen pages.

  Save for a few occasional—and not always fortunate—lapses into familiarity, Cowper’s manner of dealing with the domestic is still the manner of the earlier century, still radically opposed to these principles of “natural” poetic diction, on which Wordsworth was afterwards to insist with so much more zeal than discretion, and to delay for many years the acceptance of invaluable truth by exaggerating them in his preaching and rendering them ridiculous in his practice. Cowper is still far from that frank fraternal recognition of the common objects, ideas, and interests of life which is advocated in the famous preface to the “Lyrical Ballads.” Poetry in his hands will unbend to common things, but it is always with a too vigilant dignity: she will take notice of the tea-urn and the silk-reels, and the modest indoor pleasures and employments of the country house, but it is all done with the conscious condescension of the squire’s wife at the village school treat. And Cowper, moreover, clings still to that leisurely diffuseness of utterance which is so alien to the spirit of the great poetry, pregnant with thought, and eager to bring it to the birth. One reads him sometimes divided between delight in his perfect literary finish and irritation at its prolixity.

  Cowper’s “Task” is almost curiously barren of landscape; and the style does not essentially differ from Thomson’s except in that the poet himself is the spectator; whence, naturally, the landscape is more intimate and more devout. This poem, though of much value in its own day, now certainly disappoints.

Homer, 1791

  My dear friend’s Homer is coming abroad. I have received my copy, but the publication is not yet. I have cursorily surveyed the first volume; it seems fully equal to what I expected, for my expectations were not high. I do not think it will add to the reputation of the author of the “Task,” as a poet; but I hope the performance will not be unworthy of him, though the subject is greatly beneath the attention of the writer, who has a mind capable of original, great, and useful things; but he could not at the time fix his thoughts upon any thing better—and they who know his state will rather pity than blame him. I hope we shall have no more translations.

  You know my admiration for this truly great genius, but I am really grieved that he should lower his aims so far as to stoop to become a mere editor and translator. It is Ulysses shooting from a baby’s bow. Why does he quit the heights of Solyma for the dreams of Pindus? “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” In his own original way he has few competitors; in his new walk he has many superiors; he can do the best things better than any man, but others can do middling things better than he.

  That the translation is a great deal more close and literal, than any that had previously been attempted in English verse, probably will not be disputed by those who are the least disposed to admire it. That the style into which it is translated is a true English style, though not perhaps a very elegant or poetical one, may also be assumed; but we are not sure that a rigid and candid criticism will go farther in its commendation.

  No satiety is perceived from reading any quantity of the blank verse of Cowper; and the genius of Homer, the state of manners of the period in which he wrote, and the whole scope and design of his immortal epopees, are infinitely better felt and comprehended in the blank than in the rhymed copy of the venerable bard. The issue will most likely be this, that for insulated passages, Pope will generally be referred to; but that he who wishes to peruse, and for any length of time together, the entire poems of Homer, will have recourse to the labours of Cowper.

  I hate Cowper’s slow, dry, blank verse, so utterly alien to the spirit of the poem, and the minstrel mode of delivery. How could it have suited any kind of recitative or melody, or the accompaniment of any music? It is like a pursy, pompous, but unpolished man moving laboriously in a stiff dress of office. Those boar and lion hunting similes describing swift motion are dreadfully dragging in this sort of verse…. Cowper’s poem is like a Camera Lucida portrait—far more unlike in expression and general result than one less closely copied as to lines and features.

  Between Cowper and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer.

  The transition from Pope to Cowper is the change from poetic thraldom to poetic freedom. In the former you are held down to the severest rigor of rhythm, while yet you admire the grace, the finish, and the splendor of the chain which binds you. In the latter you find yourself let loose and range in freedom, unrestrained but by the beautiful order that rules in the very nature of things. In reading Pope, one admires the wonderful subjection of the idea, the thought in its divers phases and relations, its qualities and its measures, to the exactions of the rhyme and the rhythm; in Cowper, one admires the more wonderful incorporation of the idea into the perfect harmonies and melodies of words. One must read Pope with his attention fixed on the rhythm; he must read Cowper with his mind filled and prompted by the thought. There can hardly be supposed a wider contrast than the two present.

  Cowper brought such poetic gifts to his work that his failure might have deterred others from making the same hopeless attempt. But a failure his work is; the translation is no more a counterpart of the original, than the Ouse creeping through its meadow is the counterpart of the Ægean rolling before a fresh wind and under a bright sun. Pope delights schoolboys; Cowper delights nobody, though, on the rare occasions when he is taken from the shelf, he commends himself, in a certain measure, to the taste and judgment of cultivated men.

  He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper’s Homer, than by Pope’s; but there was not “gallop” enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far from the “hollow” ships.

On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, 1798

  This is no doubt, as a whole, Cowper’s finest poem, at once springing from the deepest and purest fount of passion, and happy in shaping itself into richer and sweeter music than he has reached in any other. It shows what his real originality, and the natural spirit of art that was in him, might have done under a better training and more favorable circumstances of personal situation, or perhaps in another age.

  Perhaps the most pathetic poem in our language, which the recluse of Olney wrote on the receipt of his mother’s picture.

  A cousin sent him his mother’s portrait. He received it in trepidation, kissed it, hung it where it would be seen last at night, first in the morning, and wrote a poem on it, whose tenderness and pathos, flowing in richer and sweeter music than he had elsewhere reached, are unequalled by anything else he has written, and surpassed by little in the language. Springing from the deepest and purest fount of passion, and shaping itself into mobile and fluent verse, it reveals his true originality, as well as that life-like elegance, that natural spirit of art, wherein consists the great revolution of the modern style.

  After reading [Tennyson] Cowper’s “Poplar Field,” “People nowadays, I believe, hold this style and metre light; I wish there were any one who could put words together with such exquisite flow and evenness.” Presently we reached the same poet’s stanzas to Mary Unwin. He read them, yet could barely read them, so deeply was he touched by their tender, their most agonizing pathos. And once when I asked him for the “Lines on my Mother’s Portrait,” his voice faltered as he said he would, if I wished it; but he knew he should break down.

Sonnets

  Petrarch’s sonnets have a more ethereal grace and a more perfect finish; Shakespeare’s more passion; Milton’s stand supreme in stateliness, Wordsworth’s in depth and delicacy. But Cowper’s unites with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the ancients would have called Irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness peculiar to his loving and ingenuous nature.—There is much mannerism, much that is unimportant or of now exhausted interest in his poems: but where he is great, it is with that elementary greatness which rests on the most universal human feelings. Cowper is our highest master in simple pathos.

  They never rise to the highest excellence, neither do they fall much below the level of his average compositions. If they embalm no superb thoughts, of which it can be said, as of Herrick’s fly in amber:

	“The urn was little but the room
	More rich than Cleopatra’s tomb;”

and if none of them have lines which have become current for their intrinsic beauty or wealth of thought, or for a breadth of application which has caused them to echo alone the decades from his day till ours, they still present refined and elevated sentiments, gracefully, naturally, and poetically, and clothe them in pure and nervous English.

Letters

  The letters of Cowper … form a perfect contrast to Pope’s. In the one, I think I see a mind striving to be great, and affecting to be unaffected; in the other, we contemplate, not the studious loftiness, but the playfulness of a mind naturally lofty, throwing at random a ray of sweetness, cheerfulness, and tenderness upon whatever subject occurs, mixed occasionally with severer touches of wisdom, and a mournful, but seldom angry survey of the follies of mankind. We see the playful humour, mingled with melancholy, and the melancholy, mingled with kindness, social feelings, sincerity and tenderness.

  There is something in the letters of Cowper inexpressibly delightful. They possess excellencies so opposite—a naïve simplicity, arising from perfect goodness of heart and singleness of purpose, contrasted with a deep acquaintance with the follies and vices of human nature, and a keen sense of humour and ridicule. They unite the playfulness of a child, the affectionateness of a woman, and the strong sense of a man: they give us glimpses of pleasures so innocent and pure as almost to realise the Eden of our great poet, contrasted with horrors so deep, as even to exceed his power of imagery to express.

  Being neither a blockhead nor conceited, you will take due interest in all that pertains to this saintly sufferer; yet there are blockheads, namely, conceited ones, that will say, “What do the public care for his stockings, or for his oysters, or for the cake that came in its native pan, or the heartless hens that refused to lay eggs to make another cake?” I would have such persons to know that a Cowper, moving in the light of his mental beauty and modest sanctity, irradiates every object that is in contact with him; it is their oysters and cakes that are insignificant, because they are so themselves. I wish I knew what kind of garters he wore; how proud and happy I should have been to knit a pair for him: I should have hung up the wires as Cervantes did his pen, considering them hallowed ever afterwards.

  The best of English letter-writers.

  The purest and most perfect specimens of familiar letters in the language. Considering the secluded, uneventful course of Cowper’s life, the charm in his letters is wonderful; and is to be explained, I believe, chiefly by the exquisite light of poetic truth which his imagination shed upon daily life, whether his theme was man, himself or a fellow-being, or books, or the mute creation which he loved to handle with such thoughtful tenderness. His seclusion did not separate him from sympathy with the stirring events of his time; and, alike in seasons of sunshine or of gloom, there is in his letters an ever-present beauty of quiet wisdom, and a gentle but fervid spirit.

  The charm of Cowper’s Correspondence consists in this succession of images, of thought, and of shades of meaning unfolded with varying vivacity, but in an equable and peaceful course. In his letters we can best apprehend the true sources of his poetry, of the true domestic poetry of private life: bantering not devoid of affection, a familiarity which disdains nothing which is interesting as being too lowly and too minute, but alongside of them, elevation or rather profundity. Nor let us forget the irony, the malice, a delicate and easy raillery such as appears in the letters I have quoted.

  Cowper’s letters are far more than contributions towards his biography. The graceful affectionateness, the shrewd estimate of men and things, the genuine love of fun and appreciation of it in others, all contribute to make his correspondence delightful. In fact, to many readers his prose will be more agreeable than his poetry, though, as in many like cases, his letters were only published because his poetry had made him famous.

  In these select letters, flowing on in the old, sweet, fresh English, one perceives the rare literary faculty, the shy humor, the discrimination, the sound sense, all the many graces of style and many virtues of intrinsic worth that have long been familiar to scholars, and, more than that, one gladly recognizes again the companionable, soft-hearted, pathetic man whose pastimes, whether in gardening, or poetry, or caring for his pets, were a refuge from the most poignant anguish; who played only to escape this terror, and at last failed even in that…. Now, it is a very striking fact that while Cowper spent the larger part of his time in religious reading and conversation, and besides meditated in private on the same themes, his letters do not show in any degree that insight into spiritual things which would naturally be looked for from real genius occupied with such subjects. Spirituality should have been his trait if religion was his life, but, in fact, these letters are in this regard barren.

  His correspondence is unaffected, facile, and often playful. Religion of course forms a substantial part of this, as it so conspicuously did of the author’s mind: but it has been noticed, and has been made matter of some reproach from certain quarters, that the religious tone of the letters diminishes very observably after 1785, when Cowper had become an eminent man in literature, and more open consequently to the entanglements of “the world.”

  His letters, like his best poetry, owe their charm to absolute sincerity…. His letters are written without an erasure—at leisure but without revision; the spontaneous gaiety is the more touching from the melancholy background sometimes indicated; they are the recreation of a man escaping from torture; and the admirable style and fertility of ingenious illustration make them perhaps the best letters in the language.

  Rich mines of pleasure and profit for us all, full to the brim of homely pleasant details which only leisure can find time to note. A man who was even ordinarily busy would never have stopped to observe the things which Cowper tells us about so charmingly.

  His letters are his principal work in prose, if not the best of all his work. They differ from most of the prose of the time by the same interval as separates the verse of “The Task” at its best from the verse of “The Botanic Garden.” The phrase of Landor, in the preface to the Hellenics, “not prismatic but diaphanous,” applies more fitly to the style of Cowper in verse and prose, especially prose, than to any other writer. It is not that the style is insipid or tame; it is alive and light; but it escapes notice, like the prose of Southey, by reason of its perfect accommodation to the matter.

  All good critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even into competition with him. Ease, correctness, facility of expression, freedom from convention within his range, harmony, truth to nature, truth to art:—these things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they had not met for a century—perhaps as they had never met—in English epistles. The one thing that he wanted was strength: as his madness was melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant.

General

  I received the letter you did me the honour of writing to me, and am much obliged by your kind present of a book. The relish for reading of poetry had long since left me, but there is something so new in the manner, so easy, and yet so correct in the language, so clear in the expression, yet concise, and so just in the sentiments, that I have read the whole with great pleasure, and some of the pieces more than once.

  I am enchanted with this poet; his images so natural and so much his own! Such an original and philosophic thinker! Such genuine christianity! and such a divine simplicity! but very rambling, and the order not very lucid. He seems to put down every thought as it arises, and never to retrench or alter anything.

	With England’s Bard, with Cowper who shall vie?
	Original in strength and dignity,
	With more than painter’s fancy blest, with lays
	Holy, as saints to heav’n expiring raise.

  I have been reading “The Task” with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton; but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the “divine chit-chat of Cowper.”

  It has been thought that Cowper was the first poet who re-opened the true way to nature and a natural style; but we hold this to be a mistake, arising merely from certain negations on the part of that amiable but by no means powerful writer. Cowper’s style is for the most part as inverted and artificial as that of the others; and we look upon him to have been by nature not so great a poet as Pope; but Pope, from certain infirmities on his part, was thrown into the society of the world, and thus had to get what he could out of an artificial sphere:—Cowper, from other and more distressing infirmities (which by the way the wretched superstition that undertook to heal, only burnt in upon him) was confined to a still smaller though more natural sphere, and in truth did not much with it, though quite as much perhaps as was to be expected from an organization too sore almost to come in contact with any thing.

  The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellowmen along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellowmen. In chastity of diction, however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.

  With all his boasted simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general descriptions of nature: he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any untoward accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads his “Vashti” forth to public view with a look of consciousness and attention to etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get bade, after a romantic adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a common, to the drawing-room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the tea-kettle—No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn…. Still he is a genuine poet, and deserves all his reputation. His worst vices are amiable weaknesses, elegant trifling. Though there is a frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness in his manner, he has left a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself.

  His language has such a masculine idiomatic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments having come from the author’s heart, and of the enthusiasm, in whatever he describes, having been unfeigned and unexaggerated…. Considering the tenor and circumstances of his life, it is not much to be wondered at, that some asperities and peculiarities should have adhered to the strong stem of his genius, like the moss and fungus that cling to some noble oak of the forest, amid the damps of its unsunned retirement. It is more surprising that he preserved, in such seclusion, so much genuine power of comic observation. Though he himself acknowledged having written “many things with bile” in his first volume, yet his satire has many legitimate objects: and it is not abstracted and declamatory satire: but it places human manners before us in the liveliest attitudes and clearest colours. There is much of the full distinctness of Theophrastus, and of the nervous and concise spirit of La Bruyè, in his piece entitled “Conversation,” with a cast of humour superadded, which is peculiarly English, and not to be found out of England.

  At last, Cowper threw off the whole trammels of French criticism and artificial refinement; and, setting at defiance all the imaginary requisites of poetical diction and classical imagery—dignity of style, and politeness of phraseology—ventured to write again with the force and the freedom which had characterised the old school of English literature, and been so unhappily sacrificed, upwards of a century before. Cowper had many faults, and some radical deficiencies;—but this atoned for all. There was something so delightfully refreshing, in seeing natural phrases and natural images again displaying their unforced graces, and waving their unpruned heads in the enchanted gardens of poetry, that no one complained of the taste displayed in the selection;—and Cowper is, and is likely to continue, the most popular of all who have written for the present or the last generation.

  Of Cowper, how shall I express myself in adequate terms of admiration? The purity of his principles, the tenderness of his heart, his unaffected and zealous piety, his warmth of devotion (however tinctured at times with gloom and despondency), the delicacy and playfulness of his wit, and the singular felicity of his diction, all conspire by turns

To win the wisest, warm the coldest heart.

Cowper is the poet of a well-educated and well-principled Englishman. “Home, sweet home” is the scene—limited as it may be imagined—in which he contrives to concentrate a thousand beauties, which others have scattered far and wide upon objects of less interest and attraction. His pictures are, if I may so speak, conceived with all the tenderness of Raffaelle, and executed with all the finish and sharpness of Teniers. No man, in such few words, tells his tale, or describes his scene, so forcibly and so justly. His views of Nature are less grand and less generalised than those of Thomson: and here, to carry on the previous mode of comparison, I should say that Thomson was the Gaspar Poussin, and Cowper the Hobbima, of rural poetry.

  Cowper divested verse of its exquisite polish; he thought in metre, but paid more attention to his thoughts than his verse. It would be difficult to draw the boundary of prose and blank verse between his letters and his poetry.

  Cowper was a good man, and lived at a fortunate time for his works.

  He is allowed, both by Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, to be the patriarch and founder of the romantic, or present school of poetry. When we say, present we ought to recollect, that there is a Lake, as well as a romantic school…. One thing, however, we must say, that a school of which that moonstruck prophet, Cowper, was the founder, is a school of which we should not wish to become disciples. Is poetry run mad? or is that poetry good for nothing, which is not run mad? So it would seem, from making Cowper the founder of that school which established itself on the ruins of the classical. The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews give him the credit of being the founder of this school,—a school of which they are themselves admirers, and yet they know he was a fanatic.

  Lord Byron unquestionably estimated Cowper much too low in calling him no poet. But many others have put him much too high, if we are to pay any consistent regard to principles…. The consideration of him raises the question of all those evanescent lines that separate the approximations between poetical fancy and poetical imagination. A painter of particular and local landscapes, or portraits, copies directly from external objects; but a describer in words, who means it to be poetry, scarcely ever (if ever) does; he copies from the internal impression made on the fancy.

  Compare the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if we mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an enthusiast in his love of the works of nature, the other driven, by disappointment or weariness, to solace himself with them as he might. It is a contrast which every one must have observed, when such topics come under discussion in society; and those who think it worth while, may find abundant illustration of it in the writings of this unfortunate but illustrious pair. The one all overflowing with the love of nature, and indicating, at every turn, that whatever his lot in life, he could not have been happy without her. The other visibly and wisely soothing himself, but not without effort, by attending to rural objects, in default of some more congenial happiness, of which he had almost come to despair. The latter, in consequence, laboriously sketching every object that came in his way: the other, in one or two rapid lines, which operate, as it were, like a magician’s spell, presenting to the fancy just that picture, which was wanted to put the reader’s minds in unison with the writer’s.

  Cowper has not Thomson’s genius, but he has much more taste. His range is neither so wide, nor so lofty, but, as far as it extends, it is peculiarly his own. He cannot paint the Plague at Carthagena, or the Snow-storm, or the Earthquake, as Thomson has done; but place him by the banks of the Ouse, or see him taking his “Winter walk at Noon,” or accompany him in his rambles through his Flower garden, and where is the Author who can compare with him for a moment? The pictures of domestic life which he has painted are inimitable. It is hard to say whether his sketches of external nature, or of indoor life, are the best. Cowper does not attempt the same variety of scene as Thomson; but in what he does attempt, he always succeeds.

  The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was Cowper.

  Cowper’s bold freedom, though it seemed at first like uncouth roughness, gained much in variety of expression, without losing much in point of sound. It offended, because it seemed careless, and as if he respected little the prevailing taste of his readers: but it was far from being unpolished as it seemed. He tells us, that the lines of his earlier poems were touched and retouched, with fastidious delicacy: his ear was not easily pleased; and yet, if we may judge from one or two specimens of alterations, his corrections very often injured what they were meant to repair.

  The poet of the Cross.

  If Cowper had written songs, such was the honesty of his nature that he would probably have equalled Burns, great as are the disadvantages under which our language would have laid him…. Cowper does not, like Burns, write the history of the poor in every page of his works, but his heart was with them…. If Cowper had been blessed with the physical strength of Burns, he might have been,—but I don’t say he would have been,—at once, one of the greatest of poets and ablest of active men. As it is, I am unable to name a poet whose writings, page for page, can boast an equal amount of original thought and sterling common sense.

  When the shame of England burns in the heart of Cowper, you must believe him; for through that heart rolled the best of England’s blood.

	Sweet are thy strains, celestial Bard;
	And oft, in childhood’s years,
	I’ve read them o’er and o’er again,
	With floods of silent tears.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Is He the source of every good,
	The spring of purity?
	Then in thine hours of deepest woe
	Thy God was still with thee.
	How else, when every hope was fled,
	Couldst thou so fondly cling
	To holy things and holy men?
	And how so sweetly sing,
	Of things that God alone could teach?
	And whence that purity,
	That hatred of all sinful ways—
	That gentle charity?

  He is emphatically the poet of ordinary and intimate life, of the domestic emotions, of household happiness. His muse is a domestic deity, a familiar Lar, and his countrymen have enshrined his verses in the very holiest penetralia of their hearths. Cowper was one of the first poets—even among the English—who ventured to describe those familiar thoughts, feelings, and enjoyments which are imagined by the word home—that word which echoes so deeply in the English heart, that word for which so many cultivated languages have neither synonym nor equivalent…. His language is in the highest degree easy, familiar, and consequently impressive; there is no author who so completely talks to his reader—none whose works breathe so completely of the individuality and personal character of their writer. He abounds in description of scenery; and we hardly regret that he should have passed his life among the dull levels of the Ouse, when we think that the power of his genius has given an unfading grace and interest to landscapes in themselves neither romantic nor sublime. It appears to us that he is greatly inferior to Thomson in comprehensiveness and rapidity of picturesque perception; but then his mode of expression is simpler, less ambitious, and in purer taste, and he surpasses not only the author of “The Seasons,” but perhaps all poets, in the power of communicating interest to the familiar details of domestic life. His humour was very delicate and just, and his descriptions of the common absurdities of ordinary intercourse are masterly. When rising, as he often and gracefully does, into the loftier atmosphere of moral or religious thought, he exhibits a surprising ease and dignity; his mind was of that rare order which can rise without an effort and sink without meanness. He is uniformly earnest and sincere.

  Cowper is eminently the David of English poetry, pouring forth, like the great Hebrew bard, his own deep and warm feelings in behalf of moral and religious truth.

	Tenderest of tender hearts, of spirits pure
	The purest! such, O Cowper! such wert thou,
	But such are not the happiest: thou wert not,
	Till borne where all those hearts and spirits rest.
	Young was I, when from Latin lore and Greek
	I play’d the truant for thy sweeter Task,
	Nor since that hour hath aught our Muses held
	Before me seem’d so precious; in one hour,
	I saw the poet and the sage unite,
	More grave than man, more versatile than boy!

  Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets. He is elevated in his “Table Talk;” acute in detailing the “Progress of Error;” and he chants the praises of “Truth” in more dulcet notes than were ever sounded by the fairest swan in Cayster. His “Expostulation” is made in the tones of a benevolent sage. His “Hope” and his “Charity” are proofs of his pure Christian-like feeling,—a feeling which also pervades his “Conversation” and his “Retirement,” and which barbs the shafts of his satire without taking away from their strength.

  As a scold, we think Cowper failed. He had a great idea of the use of railing, and there are many pages of laudable invective against various vices which we feel no call whatever to defend. But a great vituperator had need to be a great hater; and of any real rage, any such gall and bitterness as great and irritable satirists have in other ages let loose upon men,—of any thorough, brooding, burning, abiding detestation,—he was as incapable as a tame hare. His vituperation reads like the mild man’s whose wife ate up his dinner: “Really, sir, I feel quite angry!” Nor has his language any of the sharp intrusive acumen which divides in sunder both soul and spirit, and makes fierce and unforgetable reviling.

  Whatever estimate may be formed of his poetry in comparison with that of earlier or later writers, everyone must feel that his English is that of a scholar and a gentleman—that he had the purest enjoyment of domestic life, and of what one may call the domestic or still life of nature. One is sure also that he had the most earnest faith, which he cherished for others when he could find no comfort in it for himself. These would be sufficient explanations of the interest which he has awakened in so many simple and honest readers who turn to books for sympathy and fellowship, and do not like a writer at all the worse because he also demands their sympathy with him. Cowper is one of the strongest instances, and proofs, how much more qualities of this kind affect Englishmen than any others. The gentleness of his life might lead some to suspect him of effeminacy; but the old Westminster school-boy and cricketer comes out in the midst of his Meditation on Sofas; and the deep tragedy which was at the bottom of his whole life, and which grew more terrible as the shadows of evening closed upon him, shows that there may be unutterable struggles in those natures which seem least formed for the rough work of the world.

  His language is often vulgar, and not least so when his theme is most sublime; and his most successful passages, his minutely touched descriptions of familiar still-life and rural scenery, are indeed strongly suggestive, but have little of the delicate susceptibility of beauty which breathes through Thomson’s musings on nature.

  As the death of Samuel Johnson closes one era of our literature, so the appearance of Cowper as a poet opens another. Notwithstanding his obligations both to Churchill and Pope, a main characteristic of Cowper’s poetry is its originality. Compared with almost any one of his predecessors, he was what we may call a natural poet. He broke through conventional forms and usages in his mode of writing more daringly than any English poet before him had done, at least since the genius of Pope had bound in its spell the phraseology and rhythm of our poetry. His opinions were not more his own than his manner of expressing them.

  If we compare our English literature to a beautiful garden, where Milton lifts his head to heaven in the spotless chalice of the tall white lily, and Shakspere scatters his dramas round him in beds of fragrant roses, blushing with a thousand various shades—some stained to the core as if with blood, others unfolding their fair pink petals with a lovely smile to the summer sun,—what shall we find in shrub or flower so like the timid, shrinking spirit of William Cowper, as that delicate sensitive plant, whose leaves, folding up at the slightest touch, cannot bear even the brighter rays of the cherishing sun?

  William Cowper and Erasmus Darwin were contemporaries: but how has the lowlier russet outlasted the glittering Balmasque costume, a genuine human heart beneath the one, a piece of mechanism, like a skeleton-clock, within the other: the one pure, true, beating, the other movement without life, energy without appliance.

  The gentleness of his temper, and the wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in everything except the human heart…. Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac…. To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has! How he heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening seclusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge!

  While his poems have in them much that might be thought didactic, this matter is given in so natural, reflective, and yet more, in so emotional, a manner as quite to escape the censure that might be implied in the word. The thought does not, predetermined, so much seek for the image and rhythm wherewith to enforce itself, as flow out in an incidental living way from the scenes and objects present to the poetic imagination…. Cowper has a large measure of that power which brings interpretation to natural objects, and looks upon them with a rapid interplay of suggestions, uniting the visible to the invisible, and lending to passing events a scope otherwise quite beyond them…. The quiet, earnest, subtile, pure, pervasive mind of Cowper made him a poet by the innate force and character of its conceptions. There is everything in his history to confirm the view, that art finds its germ in natural endowment, and nothing to sustain the theory, that it can be compassed by external conditions.

  Cowper is the first of the poets who loves Nature entirely for her own sake. He paints only what he sees, but he paints it with the affection of a child for a flower and with the minute observation of a man. The change in relation to the subject of man is equally great. The idea of mankind as a whole which we have seen growing up is fully formed in Cowper’s mind. The range of his interests is as wide as the world, and all men form one brotherhood.

  Cowper’s diatribes against the growth of luxury have become obsolete; his religious meanings are interesting to those alone who share his creed; but his intense love of calm scenery fell in with a widely-spread sentiment of his age, and has scattered through his pages vignettes of enduring beauty. The pathetic power in which he was unrivalled, and which gives to two or three of his poems a charm quite unique in its kind, seems to belong to no age.

  The eager, sudden-looking, large-eyed, shaven face of Cowper is familiar to us in his portraits—a face sharp-cut and sufficiently well-moulded, without being handsome, nor particularly sympathetic. It is a high-strung, excitable face; as of a man too susceptible and touchy to put himself forward willingly among his fellows, but who, feeling a “vocation” upon him, would be more than merely earnest—self-asserting, aggressive, and unyielding. This is in fact very much the character of his writings. He was an enthusiastic lover of Nature, and full of gentle kindliness, and of quiet pleasant good-humour,—and all these lovable qualities appear in ample proportion and measure in passages of his writings: but at the same time his narrow, exclusive, severe, and arbitrary religious creed—a creed which made him as sure that other people were wicked and marked out for damnation as that himself was elected and saved (and even as regards himself this confidence gave way sometimes to utter desperation)—this creed speaks out in his poems in unmistakable tones of harsh judgment and unqualified denunciation. Few writers are more steadily unsparing of the lash than the shrinking sensitive Cowper. It may be that he does not lay it on with the sense of personal power, and indignant paying-off of old scores, which one finds in a Juvenal or a Pope; but the conviction that he is the mouthpiece of Providence, and that, when William Cowper has pronounced a man reprobate, the smoke of his burning is certain to ascend up for ever and ever, stands instead of much, and lends unction to the hallowed strain. In conformity with this inspiration, his writing is nervous and terse, well stored with vigorous stinging single lines; and his power of expressive characterization, whether in moral declaiming or in descriptive work, is very considerable:—and was (at any rate in the latter class of passages) even more noticeable in his own day than it is in ours. Apart from his religion, Cowper (as has just been said) was eminently humane and gentle-hearted; the interest which he took in his tame hares will perhaps be remembered when much of his wielding of the divine thunderbolts against the profane shall have been forgotten…. In point of literary or poetic style, Cowper was mainly independent, and the pioneer of a simpler and more natural method than he found prevailing; his didactic or censorial poems may be regarded as formed on the writings of Churchill rather than of any other predecessor.

  An amiable piety makes his “Task,” a long moralizing poem in blank verse, attractive to many minds; from the mere literary point of view, it must be allowed to be a feeble production. As he gained more confidence in himself, he developed a curious sort of mild feline humor, which appears in the delightful ballad of “John Gilpin,” and in several shorter pieces. The strength which had been wanting all his life came to him near its close, and inspired him to write those stanzas of wondrous majesty and beauty which have the title of “The Castaway,” unhappily it was the strength of spiritual despair.

  The pathos of Cowper’s life and his position in our poetical history will always lend a special interest to his work, even though it is no longer possible to regard a poet limited as he was as a poet of the first order. He was an essentially original writer, owing much of course as every writer must owe, to the subtle influences of his time, but deriving as little as ever poet derived from literary study…. We read Cowper, indeed, not for his passion or for his ideas, but for his love of nature and his faithful rendering of her beauty; for his truth of portraiture, for his humour, for his pathos; for the refined honesty of his style, for the melancholy interest of his life, and for the simplicity and the loveliness of his character.

  His pictures of social life are as truthful as they are charming. All is natural, forcible and pathetic, humorous at times, and frequently desponding and gloomy; but through all these is an undertone of unaffected piety that rises occasionally into higher utterances. And so it is that his popularity has never been on the decline. And there are passages, particularly of domestic life, that one hears perpetually quoted. As a letter-writer, no man perhaps has ever excelled him. His epistolary style is the finest in our language, abounding in every phase of sentiment, humour, sadness, pathos, liveliness, yet all spontaneous and natural.

  This then was the training which made a poet of Cowper, one of the most popular in England—in his way a transforming influence, a new beginning of intellectual life and power. Had we been left to conjecture what lines of education would have been the best on which to raise up for us the precursor of a new poetical age, certainly these are not the lines which we would have chosen. Nor, had we been asked to prophesy what were the works to be expected from a man so exceptionally circumstanced—with a past so strangely chequered, a future so painfully uncertain, a mind so sensitive, and which had passed through so many passionate struggles—could we have hit upon anything half so unlikely as the actual issue. What we should have looked for would have been some profound and morbid study of a despairing soul, some terrible pictures like those of Job, some confusion of gloomy skies and storms, and convulsions of nature. That anatomy of the heart which he gives us in his various narratives of his own feelings, that minute dissection of quivering nerve and tissue, would have been what we should have looked for in his poetry. But lo, when the moment came, and the prophet was softly persuaded and guided into the delivery of his burden, it was no such wild exposition of the terrors and pangs of the soul that came to his lips. These heavy vapours melted and dispersed from the infinite sweet blueness of the heavens: he forgot himself as if he had never been—and forgot all those miseries of the imagination, those bitter pangs and sorrows, the despair and darkness through which he had stumbled blindly for years. A soft and genial freedom entered into his soul, involuntary smiles came to him, light to his eyes, and to his steps such wandering careless grace, such devious gentle ways, as no one had dreamed of.

  Cowper is less read than he deserves to be; but he has this glory, that he has ever been the favorite poet of deeply religious minds; and his history is peculiarly touching, as that of one who, himself plunged in despair and madness, has brought hope and consolation to a thousand other souls.

  Cowper’s poetry will not win hosts of admirers; no societies will be formed for the purpose of reading papers on his verses and expounding his meaning; but the reader who may be interested in other things than the pomp and clatter of contemporary poetry will be rewarded by occasional tender, simple passages. He will detect many attractive qualities in the poems, but he is tolerably sure not to be swept off his feet by enthusiasm. This is generally the fate of a reformer, or the first man who writes under a new impulse. He is like the guide-post where roads divide; he points the way which others are able to make more attractive, and is soon forgotten. We overlook Cowper’s simple record of nature while we are under the influence of Wordsworth’s mightier verse, and we grow impatient of his philosophy when we see how much further later poets carried the notion of the brotherhood of man which he was one of the first authoritatively to utter.

  Cowper is a true poet of a very rare type, one of the most important in the development of English poetry.

  The greatest things in this world are often done by those who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the world’s standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.

  It would be scarcely claiming too much if we set down the whole of Cowper’s original poetry (the translation of Homer is of course not included) as belonging to the literature of the Evangelical Revival. No doubt the fire of his genius would have burnt brightly, whatever his religious sentiments might have been. In the productions of his elegant pen we should, under any circumstances, have recognised at least the disjecti membra poetæ. But, as a matter of fact, his Christian convictions were the mainspring which set the whole machinery of his poetical work in motion. It was this which gave coherence and symmetry and soul to it all. Abstract the religious element from his compositions, and they all fall to pieces; but, in fact, it is impossible to do so. With the exception of one or two lighter pieces, there is an undercurrent of Christian sentiment running through and inseparable from them all.

  The moral meditations of Young had comprised much vigorous declamation of native English growth. Cowper, a far greater poet, expressed in purer and simpler language thoughts with more of substantial worth, as well as a strain of sentiment, manly, religious, and gravely affectionate. In him, too, we find an admirable fidelity to outward nature in detail; although with her grander forms, unendeared by association, he had little sympathy; while ideal representations of scenery are no more to be found in his poetry than ideal conceptions of character.

  Cowper is less read than he deserves to be, but he has this glory, that he has ever been the favourite poet of deeply religious minds.

  Cowper has probably few readers now. One sometimes meets with an elderly lady, brought up in an Evangelical family, who, having been made to learn the “Moral Satires” and “The Task” by heart when a child, still remembers a good deal of them, and cherishes for the poet of Evangelicism the tender affections which gathers in old age round the things which belongs to childhood. But we have most of us ceased to be Evangelical, and most of us who love poetry having come under the spell of Goethe and of the lesser poets of the nineteenth century, find poor Cowper a little cramped, a little narrow, and, to tell the truth, a little dull. Yet there are passages in Cowper’s poetry which deserve to live and will live, and which will secure him a place, not indeed among English poets of the first rank, but high among those of the second. The pity is that they run great risk of being buried and lost forever in the wilderness of sermons which fills up such a large part of “The Progress of Error” and “The Task.” It is very hard to write sermons that will live, and, as a writer of sermons, I am afraid Cowper is likely to take his place on the very peaceful and dusty upper shelf in our libraries where the divines of the last century repose. But he deserves a better fate than this, and all lovers of English poetry ought to do what they can to save him from it.

  Cowper’s virtue was in his simplicity and genuineness, rare qualities then; his good fortune was in never belonging to the literary set or bowing to the town taste; hence in a time the most barren in English literature, he gave us a half dozen fine poems that stand far beyond all contemporary rivalry, and some private letters of the best style and temper. When, however, the question comes as to the intrinsic value of these letters, it must be confessed that though they please the taste they do not interest the mind except in a curious and diverting way. They are less the letters of a poet than of a village original, a sort of schoolmaster or clergyman manqué, of sound sense, tender heart and humane perception, but the creature of a narrow sphere.

  Direct, easeful, chaste—Cowper’s best work is all this, and more; he had the foundation of common sense, without which the other gifts of song go for little or nothing. Given common sense together with spontaneity and taste, and genuine poetry is assured. Beyond these qualifications Cowper reveals both humor,—though humor, perhaps, may be an integral part of taste—and pathos, two essential forces seldom found separated. And having enumerated thus far, we have but to add imagination, and we have the outfit for a poet of the first order. But it will not do to claim for Cowper great imaginative power, nor can we credit him with that certainty, that continuity of inspiration which stamps a master of the guild. We shall look to him in vain for the sublime; furthermore, we shall find that if he can move lightly and gracefully on levels not the highest, he can also plod there, and that right heavily. To transfer the figure from the feet to the hands, the fingers are naturally nimble, but suddenly on go the Methodist mittens, and we are in for a pull of theologic fumbling.

  There is no more interesting poet than Cowper, and hardly one the area of whose influence was greater. No man, it is unnecessary to say, courted popularity less, yet he threw a very wide net, and caught a great shoal of readers. For twenty years after the publication of “The Task” in 1785, his general popularity never flagged, and even when in the eyes of the world it was eclipsed, when Cowper became in the opinion of fierce Byronians and moss-trooping Northerners, “a coddled Pope” and a milksop, our great, sober, Puritan middle-class took him to their warm firesides for two generations more…. Had Cowper not gone mad in his thirty-second year, and been frightened out of the world of trifles, we should have had another Prior, a wittier Gay, an earlier Praed, an English La Fontaine.

  Cowper, the herald of Wordsworth, may perhaps be described as a reformer of poetry, but it is more significant of his historical position to describe him as an essayist in verse.

  I am in a state of great excitement about Cowper. Reading him right through I was more than ever struck with his innumerable felicities. Yet how very terribly he sinks! The style sinks, but still more the thought. I imagined that his fine taste had piloted him through the theological mare mortuum of his age and school with comparative safety. But really, it is not so. He is often quite abominable; so rude, so insolent. He sends his antagonists to the Devil; literally, if I am not mistaken, tells them to go to H—ll; exults over them, sneers, jeers, jokes. His mildest attitude is a “sarve them right,” and his idea of God as the owner of some patent sort of peep-show, which, if we don’t appreciate, he will d—n our eyes for a set of God knows what, is absolutely Swiftian in its utter vulgarity. What a detestable poison has penetrated his vitals! Mind, it is not the doctrine, but the swagger and infernal rudeness that offend me. The style too becomes infected; with all this ghastly machinery of unreason, he takes it upon him to be flippant. Such “awful mirth” is almost unparalleled in literature. He even assumes an athletic, or pseudo-athletic vigour of contemptuous denunciation.

  Critics are agreed that we shall not rank him among the great poets; but he comes nearer to their rank than anybody in his day believed possible. He is so true; he is so tender; he is so natural. If in his longer poems there is sometimes a lack of last finish, and an overplus of language—there is a frankness of utterance and a billowy undulation of movement that have compensating charms. He loves Nature as a boy loves his play; his humanities are wakened by all her voices. He not only seizes upon exterior effects with a painter’s eye and hand, but he has a touch which steals deeper meanings and influences and transfers them into verse that flows softly and quietly as summer brooks. He cannot speak or rhyme but the odors of the country cling to his words.

  Several of Cowper’s short poems are inimitable. He writes so very like a gentleman.

  William Cowper’s first poems were some of the “Olney Hymns,” 1779, and in these the religious poetry of Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which fills the whole of Cowper’s poetry, introduced a theological element into English poetry which continually increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson. His didactic and satirical poems in 1782 link him backwards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton with the revived study of the English poets. The playful and gentle vein of humour which he showed in “John Gilpin” and other poems, opened a new kind of verse to poets. With this kind of humour is connected a simple pathos of which Cowper is a great master. The “Lines to Mary Unwin” and to his “Mother’s Picture” prove, with the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free from artifice had returned to English song. A new element was also introduced by him and Blake—the love of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after poets. His greatest work was the “Task.”

  Cowper, even more than most writers, deserves and requites consideration under the double aspect of matter and form. In both he did much to alter the generally accepted conditions of English poetry; and if his formal services have perhaps received less attention than they merit, his material achievements have never been denied.

  Such were the simple elements of Cowper’s landscape. They have no special attraction that is not shared by hundreds of other similar scenes in the Oolitic tracts of England. To the cursory visitor they may even seem tame and commonplace. And yet for us, apart from any mere beauty they may possess, they have been for ever glorified and consecrated by the imagination of the poet. We see in them the natural features which soothed his sorrow and gladdened his heart, and which became the sources of an inspiration that breathed fresh life into the poetry of England. The lapse of time has left the scene essentially unchanged. We may take the same walks that Cowper loved, and see the same prospects that charmed his eyes and filled his verse. In so following his steps, we note the accuracy and felicity of his descriptions, and appreciate more vividly the poetic genius which, out of such simple materials, could work such a permanent change in the attitude of his countrymen towards nature.

  The cold indifference of the moderns towards Cowper is largely due to the fact that he has left no love poetry behind him. For this reason they may find him uninteresting, and they regard him pretty much as he says his contemporaries and former associates did: “They think of me as of the man in the moon, and whether I have a lantern, a dog and a faggot, or whether I have neither of these desirable accommodations, is to them a matter of perfect indifference.” Whether his heart was torn with the agonies of love or not, Cowper does not tell us. He has left no confessions of this nature. His appeal is not to our passionate ’prentice years, but to our maturity, when having suffered, we have learnt our lesson, and profited by it to pass out of the petty circle of ourselves into the study of life’s larger whole.

  Cowper was pre-eminently a poet of feelings; he may have been melancholy, but he pointed out to his readers how they were themselves subjects of emotion. He owed a debt to Providence, and he rebuked the people for their follies. In doing so he was regardless of his own fame and of their opprobrium. He gave them tolerable advice, and strove to awaken them from their apathy to a sense of their duty towards their neighbours. First, of poets, since the days of Milton, to champion the sacredness of religion, he was the forerunner of a new school that disliked the political satires of the disciples of Pope, and aimed at borrowing for their lines of song from the simple beauties of a perfect nature.

  Cowper knew every landmark about Olney and weaved many a one into his verse. He loved Nature in his gentle way, and her influence must often have been a healing one, when thoughts of those dark insane fits, which turned his homely life into a tragedy, hovered about his mind. He did not observe her with so nice an eye as poor Clare the peasant, who beginning in gladness also ended in the despondency and madness which a poet has declared to be the lot of poets; and I have always had my doubts about the nightingale which he believed he heard in full song on New Year’s Day. And yet the “Winter Walk at Noon,” among other poems, has lines and descriptions worth remembering. The rich laburnum—“laburnum,” as Tennyson put it, “drooping wells of fire”—and the leafless but lovely mezereon and the myriad blossomed yellow broom of full summertide—these and many other features in the pageant of the spring and summer he noted and set forth with a lover’s eye, if in rather stilted language and in somewhat too much the form of a catalogue to please us to-day. Cowper belonged as a poet of nature rather to the Thomson than the Wordsworth school.