'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 of 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 equalled; 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 theoretical; in those of Cowper, it is practical and experi mental. Indeed, it is Cowper's distinction to have dissipated the prejudice that contemplative piety cannot 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 reigns 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 descriptions 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 only 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 throne 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 union with human 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 despair, were 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 in his mind the gray 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 harlequin 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 features of the mournful attendants into laughter. But the mind, long wearied with the sameness of a dull, dreary prospect, will gladly fix its eyes on anything 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 ludicrous, 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 abhorrence; because when I am not occupied, I suffer under the whole influence of my unhappy temperament.'

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 his friend, Mr. Newton, respecting himself and Mrs. Unwin, he said:

'But you may be assured, that notwithstanding 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 in 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. . . .

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 men. For 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 been 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 the saintly Cowper despairing of Heaven, and the melancholy Cowper singing John Gilpin:

'Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, and 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 to 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.'

Influence.

He was, if not the founder of a new school, the

pioneer of a new era. 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.

He was practically the first to make poetry the handmaid to piety. Religion no longer stood shivering and forlorn,' but attired in the beauty of poetic enchantment, scattering flowers 'where'er she deigned to stray.'

To estimate the scope and endurance of his practical influence, it is sufficient to consider the popularity which his poems gained and still preserve; their meditative and moral tone, ever slipping in between

"The beauty coming and the beauty gone;'

and the natural law by which the mind grows into the likeness of its associated images. No good thing is lost. All excellence is perpetual:

When one that holds communion with the skies
Has filled his urn where the pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
'Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings;
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide.'