natural; and because none less natural than Pope, in 'his version of Homer, therefore, than he, none less pathetic.'

'I wish that all English readers had an unsophisticated and unadulterated taste, and could relish real simplicity. But I am well aware that, in this respect, I am under a disadvantage, and that many, especially many ladies, missing many pretty terms of expression that they have admired in Pope, will account my translation, in those particulars, defective. But I comfort myself with the thought that in reality it is no defect; on the contrary, that the want of all such embellishments as do not belong to the original will be one of its principal merits with persons really capable of relishing Homer. He is the best poet that ever lived, for many reasons, but for none more than that majestic plainness that distinguishes him from all others. As an accomplished person moves gracefully without thinking of it, in like manner the dignity of Homer seems to have cost him no labor. It was natural to him to say great things, and to say them well, and little ornaments were beneath his notice.'

These ideas and strictures indicate that a new light had risen in the poetical firmament; that in the manner of writing a new spirit had broken out; that, as the flower grows into fruit, the form of the human mind, since the soulless days of Queen Anne, had changed. Feeling is poetical, and nature is re-asserted. Cowper's version, however, though more faithful than Pope's, in aiming at greater force and vigor, became too rugged and harsh.

Style.—Animated, vigorous, pointed, free, clear, and expressive. Less musical and brilliant than Pope's, less warm and glowing perhaps than Goldsmith's, it has more nature than the former, more 'bone and muscle' than the latter. His manner was his own. He wrote from a full soul, not for the pleasure of making a noise in the world, but to occupy himself. Hence his naturalness; hence his contempt of the 'creamy smoothness' of fashionable verse. Not the constraint of outward form, but―

Give me the line that ploughs its stately course
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force;
That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart,
Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.

While he admires Pope

As harmony itself exact,

In verse well disciplined, complete, compact,

he condemns his devotion to form :

But he, his musical finesse was such,

So nice his ear, so delicate his touch,

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his time by heart.

In reading Pope, we are impressed by the wonderful subjection of the idea to the exactions of the rhyme and the rhythm; in Cowper, by the earnestness of his thought, the purity and sweetness of his emotion. We read no poetry with a deeper conviction that its sentiments have come

from the author's heart. We are not to suppose, however, that, he wrote without care and even anxiety. On the contrary, his example is but another illustration of the cumulative truth, that the price of excellence in composition is labor. In more than one passage he has descanted on,The shifts and turns,

The expedients and inventions multiform,

To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms,
Though apt, yet coy and difficult to win.

Rank. For colloquial freedom of manner, for noble and tender sentiment, for fervent piety, for glowing patriotism, for appreciation of natural beauty and domestic life, for humor and quiet satire, for descriptive power, for skill and variety of expression (at least in the Task),—he has seldom been equaled; and for all of these qualities combined, he has been surpassed by few or by none.

Young's religion and mirth seem to belong to different men; Cowper lives in every line, and moves in every scene. Milton is more majestic, erudite, and profound; but he has less ease and elegance-is less completely a companion, a friend. In the productions of Milton and Young, religion is mainly controversial and theorotical;-in those of Cowper, it is practical and experimental. Indeed, it is Cowper's distinction to have dissipated the prejudice that contemplative piety can not be poetical. For the first time the multitude saw with pleasure,

-a bard all fire,

Touched with a coal from heaven, assume the lyre,
And tell the world, still kindling as he sung,

With more than mortal music on his tongue,

That he who died below, and reings above,

Inspires the song, and that his name was love.

Pope has more brilliancy and a more exquisite sense of the elegances of art; but who would select him as a mirror of the affections, the regrets, the feelings, the desires, which all have felt and would wish to cherish? In his discriptions of nature, he is less ideal than Thomson, but more rapturous, simpler in diction, and more picturesque-more abounding in curious details. Thomson's piety is of the kind easily satisfied and thoughtlessly thankful. With all his love of natural scenery, the world is comparatively mechanical and dead. With Cowper,

There lives and moves

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

It is he who alike

Gives its lustre to an insect's wing,
And wheels his thronel'upon the rolling world.

When the human is touched and enlightened by the Divine,

In that blest moment, Nature, throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The author of her beauties, who retired
Behind his own creation works unseen

By the impure, and hears his word denied......
But O thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!

Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor,
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away.

It is to be observed, also, that Cowper, more intimately than Thomson, sees Nature in human with union passion. Her full depth and tenderness are never revealed except to the heart that throbs with human interest.

His productions were eminently his own.

He says:

'I reckon it among my principal advantages as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these twenty years. Imitation even of the best models is my aversion; it is a servile and mechanical trick, that has enabled many to usurp the name of author, who could not have written at all if they had not written upon the pattern of 'some original. But when the ear and the task have been much accustomed to the style and manner of others, it is almost impossible to avoid it, and we imitate, in spite of ourselves, just in the same proportion as we admire.'

Again, referring to the Task:

'My descriptions are all from nature, not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience; not one of them borrowed from books, or in the least degree conjectural.'

Objects hitherto regarded with disdain or dispair, where by him thought fit to be clothed in poetic imagery. He scrupled not to employ in verse every expression that would have been admitted in prose. In both these particulars the choice and management of subjects-his predecessors had been circumscribed by the observance of the classical model; but moved by his inner strength and courage of soul, he crossed the enchanted circle, and regained the long lost freedom of English poetry.

Character-Quiet, earnest, pure, sensitive, tender, imaginative, devout, and unhappy.

He was predisposed to melancholy and insanity. A disposition to sadness was habitual; and subsiding grief, or the pressure of severe calamity, passing away, left his mind the grey and solemn twilight that succeeds a partial or total eclipse. This state of gloom most probably resulted from some physical derangement; certainly not from sympathy with the suffering and sorrowing world, nor from sad experience of the troubles and conflicts of life. He says:

'My mind has always a melancholy cast, and is like some pools I have seen, which, though filled with a black and putrid water, will nevertheless in a bright day reflect the sunbeams from their surface.'

'Indeed, I wonder, that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellect, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if a harliquin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would be unreasonable at any rate, but more specially so if they should. distort the figures of the mournful attendants into laughter. But the mind, long wearied with the sameness of a dull, dreary prospect, will gladly fix its eyes an any thing that may make a little variety in its contemplations, though it were but a kitten playing with her tail.'

His only human relief was occupation :

"The melancholy that I have mentioned to you, and concerning which you are so kind as to inquire, is of a kind, so far as I know, peculiar to myself. It does not at all affect the operations of my mind, on any subject to which I can attach it, whether serious or hidicrous, or whatever it may be, for which reason I am almost always employed either in reading or writing, when I am not engaged in conversation. A vacant hour is my abhorence; because when I am not occupied, I suffer under the whole influence of my unhappy temperament. I thank you for your recommendation of a medicine from which you have derived benefit yourself; but there is hardly anything that I have not proved however beneficial it may have been found to others, in my own case, utterly useless I have, therefore, long since bid adieu from all hope to human means-the means excepted of perpetual employment.'

Innocent, amiable, and pious, he lived-oftentimes in a sweat of agony-in dread of the eternal Wrath. He could not persuade himself that one so vile as he conceived himself to be, could ever partake of the benefits of the Gospel; and-consistently with the Calvinistic system he had embraced-thought himself predestined to be damned:

'The dealings of God with me are to myself utterly unintelligible. I have never met, either in books or in conversation, with an experience at all similar to my own. More than twelve months have now passed since I began to hope, that having walked the whole breadth of the bottom of this Red Sea, I was beginning to climb the opposite shore, and I prepared to sing the song of Moses. But I have been disappointed; those hopes have been blasted; those comforts have been wrested from me.'

Writing to Mr. Newton respecting himself and Mrs. Unwin, he says:

'But you may be assured, that nothwithstanding all the rumours to the contrary, we are exactly what we were when you saw us last:-I, miserable on account of God's departure from me, which I believe to be final; and she seeking his return to me in the path of duty, and by continual prayer.'

Already in the lengthening shadow of the grave he wrote:

'I expect that in six days, at the latest, I shall no longer foresee, but feel the accomplishment of all my fears. O lot of unexampled misery incurred in a moment! O wretch! to whom death and life are alike impossible! Most miserable at present in this, that being thus miserable I have my senses continued to me, only that I may look forward to the worst. It is certain, at least, that I have them for no other purpose, and but very imperfectly for this. My thoughts are like loose and dry sand, which, the closer it is grasped, slips the sooner away. Mr. Johnson reads to me, but I lose every other sentence through the inevitable wanderings of my mind, and experience, as I have this two years, the same shattered mode of thinking on every subject, and on all occasions. If I seem to write with more connexion, it is only because the gaps do not appear.'

Adieu.-I shall not be here to receive your answer, neither shall I ever see you more. Such is the expectation of the most desperate, and the most miserable of all beings.

Yet he never questioned the loving kindness of God, the perfect rectitude of His providence, nor the support and joy of His religion to all menfor him alone, mysteriously, there was no assured hope.

We are not to charge religion with the affecting peculiarity of his case. It seems to be the nature of the poetic temperament-physical disorder aside-to vibrate between extremes, to carry everything to excess, to find torment or rapture where others find only relaxation. Thus the author of Night Thoughts was in conversation a jovial and witty man. 'There have boen times in my life,' says Goethe, 'when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to console and to cheer me.' Alas! it is all outside,' said Johnson; 'I may be cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!' So we have thesaintly Cowper despairing of Heaven, and the melancholy Cowper singing

John Gilpin:

Strange as it may scem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, an but for that saddest mood, perhaps, would never have been written at all.'

Never was poet more lonely or sad; yet by none has domestic happiness been more beautifully described. Despondent and remorseful, no one knew better the divine skill of strengthening the weak, of encouraging the timid, of pouring the healing oil into the wounded spirit.

As a writer, his ruling desire was to be useful. Referring to the Task, he says:

'I can write nothing without aiming, at least, at usefulness. It were beneath my years to do it, and still more dishonourable to my religion. I know that a reformation of such abuses as I censured, is not be expected from the efforts of a poet; but to contemplate the world, its follies, its vices, its indifference to duty, and its strenuous attachment to what is evil, and not to reprehend it, were to approve it. From this charge at least I shall be clear, for I have neither tacitly, nor expressly, flattered either its characters or its customs.'

a new era.

Influence. He was, if not the founder of a new school, the pioneer of When he died-one-hundred years after the death of Dryden— blank verse was restored to favor, and English poetry was again in possession of its varied endowment. For the first time, it became apparent that the despotism of Pope and Addison had passed away.

By the marriage of verse to theology and morals, he secured for poetry a more cordial reception in religious quarters.