of our century. He is largely influenced by Pope and the prevailing Deism, but he works out his own belief, and makes his own speculations; and though he is not Christian, he expresses his belief in a personal relation between himself and God. It is more personal than Pope would have made it, it is infinitely less than Cowper would have made it, and the absence of Christ makes it of an altogether different quality. But the transitional element in it makes it interesting enough to quote. After saying that his verse cannot dare to try and express God, nor paint His features, "veiled by light," he goes on

My soul the vain attempt forego :
Thyself, the fitter subject, know.
He wisely shuns the bold extreme,
Who soon lays by the unequal theme,
Nor runs, with wisdom's sirens caught,

On quicksands swallowing shipwrecked thought:

But, conscious of his distance, gives

Mute praise, and humble negatives.
In One, no object of our sight,
Immutable and infinite,
Who can't be cruel or unjust,
Calm and resigned, I fix my trust:
To him my past and present state
I owe, and must my future fate.
A stranger, into life I'm come,
Dying may be our going home;
Transported here by angry fate,
The convicts of a prior state.
Hence I no anxious thoughts bestow

On matters I can never know;

Through life's foul way, like vagrant, passed,

He'll grant a settlement at last,

And with sweet ease the wearied crown,

By leave to lay his being down.

*

He for His creatures must decree
More happiness than misery,
Or be supposed to create,

Curious to try, what 'tis to hate :

And do an act which rage infers,

'Cause lameness halts, or blindness errs.

There is more of the speculative audacity of the century in that than there is of piety; there is a fine moral certainty that God, however unknown, must be just and loving, but the point in it on which I dwell is its individuality. It is not a systematic philosophy of religion like Pope's, it is a personally wrought out religion, and it owed that to his country life. For in such a life, men, removed from the conventional thought of the literary circles in London, had room for individual development, if they had received some previous culture. This was especially true of religious feeling, and a little before the Essay on Man was written, a true devotional element entered into our poetry in the hymns of Watts, and entered it outside of the town. Watts lived an easy, retired life, in a great country house, from 1712 to 1748. There is in his hymns that pleasant devotion to God which arises from piety and comfort, from placid enjoyment of the beauty of the world, from a distant contemplation of the sufferings of the poor beyond the gates of the park, and from the gratitude to God which both these enjoyments are likely to create. Many of them strike a note of very fine praise, others of a didactic charity; and some are touched with a quaint and simple joy. Few hymns are better and brighter than that which begins

But still, we have in them no special tendency in doctrine, and no passionate or personal feeling of devotion.

It is the quiet, sober, moral religion of England on which we touch; but even so, it is a wholly different atmosphere from that which Pope breathed, and I doubt if he could have drawn a single breath in it. It is impossible to fancy Pope "abroad in the meadows to see the young lambs," still less to fancy him linking religious feeling to such a sight. The kind of devotion, and the scenery that stirred it, were both out of his sphere. Half a century passes by and the change has deepened; the seed Watts sowed has sprung into a mighty tree; the quiet and sober religion of his hymns has become the impassioned and storm-tossed religion of the hymns of Cowper. The praise which filled the heart of Watts when he looked abroad on Nature has become the agonised prayer of Cowper as he looked into the depths of his own soul.

What was the cause of this change, what new influence from without had come upon English poetry? It was the great religious movement, led by the Wesleys, joined afterwards by the fiery force of Whitfield, which descended through Newton to the hymns and poetry of Cowper. It was a preaching which, beginning in the year 1739, seven years after the first books of the Essay on Man appeared, woke up, and into fierce extremes, the religious heart of England. The vast crowds which on moor or hillside, in the deserted quarries of Devon and Cornwall, listened

to Wesley, excited by their own numbers, almost maddened by his passionate preaching and prayer, lifted into Heaven and shaken over Hell in turns as the sermon went on, crying aloud, writhing on the ground, tears streaming down their cheeks, could not find in the hymns of Watts or the metrical Psalms any expression of their wild experience; and the inexpressible emotion of their hearts demanded voice for itself in poetry and in music, the two languages of emotion. Both the Wesleys, but chiefly Charles, had already, in 1738, seen and prepared for the want, and a new class of devotional poetry arose. It was impassioned, personal and doctrinal; it was impassioned, for its subject was the history of the heart in its long struggle with sin, in its wrestling with God, in the horror of its absence from Him, in the unspeakable joy of its presence with Him, in its degradation, its redemption, and its glory, above all in its personal relation to Christ, and the world of feelings which arose from that relation; nor was there a single chord of religious feeling left unsounded, nor any that was not strung to tension. It was also made especially personal. The first person was continually used, so that each who sung or read the hymn spoke of himself and felt Christ in contact with himself. And it was doctrinal, for whether it sprang from the party of Wesley or that of Whitfield, or from their subdivisions, it was built on clear lines of theological thought; and the opposition between the parties, who knew well the power of verse as a teacher and fixer of doctrine, caused the lines to be drawn with studious clearness.

Three things then belonged to it-passion, the personal

element, and expression of doctrine. Neither of the first two were by their nature apart from poetry, and the fact is that so much are they of the essence of poetry, that most of these hymns are by force of them, poetical. Passion had been long asleep in English poetry, ever since the time of Elizabeth, and though I do not say that this religious movement made the passion of the coming poetry, yet it was one of its elements; and it is quite plain that its emotional element was not out of harmony with a school which in a few years, in Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, was destined to express almost every phase of emotion. Neither was its insistance on personal feeling out of tune with the work of a class of men like the Poets who "in themselves possess their own desire." In fact both these elements are characteristic of the poetry which was now about to arise in England. They both took root in Cowper, but they were sown and watered by religion. He struck the first note of the passionate poetry, but the passion in him was in connexion with religion. He struck the first note of that personal poetry which was afterwards carried so far in the Prelude of Wordsworth, the Alastor of Shelley, the Childe Harold of Byron, but he struck it in connexion with religion. Other poets led their passions and their personal history into other realms, but Cowper kept them within the sphere of his relation to God. Other poets derived their passion from different sources-from Nature, from Beauty, from the ideas of political rights and freedom, but Cowper derived it from the daily wrestling of his soul with God. And both the passionate and the personal element came down to Cowper from without, from the great