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.-BASCOM, JOHN, 1874, Philosophy of English Literature, pp. 218, 219.

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 The range of his interests is as wide as the world, and all men form one brotherhood. -BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1876, English Literature (Primer), p. 148.

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 widelyspread 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. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 454.

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 selfasserting, 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. ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1878, Lives of Famous Poets, pp. 185, 186.

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. -ARNOLD, THOMAS, 1878, English Literature, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. VII.

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 lovelinesss of his character. WARD, THOMAS HUMPHRY, 1880, The English Poets, vol. III, pp. 423, 433.

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. epistolary style is the finest in our language, abounding in every phase of sentiment, humour, sadness, pathos, liveliness, yet all spontaneous and natural.-WALLER, J. F., 1881, Boswell and Johnson, Their Companions and Contemporaries, p. 148.

His

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 strugglescould 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.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET 0. W., 1882, Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, vol. I, p. 49.

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. -FARRAR, FREDERICK WILLIAM, 1883, With the Poets, Preface, p. xviii.

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 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. -PERRY, THOMAS SERGEANT, 1883, English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, p. 437.

Cowper is a true poet of a very rare type, one of the most important in the development of English poetry.-HARRISON, FREDERIC, 1883-86, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces, p. 381.

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.-CORSON, HIRAM, 1886, An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry, p. 12.

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 poeta. 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-OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1886, The Evangelical Revival in the Eighteenth Century, p. 127.

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.DE VERE, AUBREY, 1887, Essays Chiefly on Poetry, vol. II, p. 120.

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. SAUNDERS, FREDERICK, 1887, The Story of Some Famous Books, p. 112.

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 ninetenth 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.BAILEY, J. C., 1889, William Cowper, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 60, p. 261.

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.-WOODBERRY, GEORGE EDWARD, 1890, Studies in Letters and Life, p. 227.

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. CHENEY, JOHN VANCE, 1892, A Study of Cowper, The Chautauquan, vol. 15, p. 405.

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.— BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1892, Res Judicata, pp. 90, 94.

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.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1894, The Literature of the Georgian Era, ed., Knight, p. 132.

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-11; 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 destestable 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.BROWN, THOMAS EDWARD, 1895, To S. T. Irwin, July 16; Letters, vol. II, p. 109.

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.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 254.

Several of Cowper's short poems are inimitable. He writes so very like a gentleman. LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK, 1896, My Confidences, p. 178.

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." -BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1896, English Literature, p. 223.

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.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 4.

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. — GEIKIE, SIR ARCHIBALD, 1898, Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature, p. 13.

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