sity. In the "Castaway," a pocm in its sphere of the very highest class, where simplicity of pitiful narration is set in melodious verse by an Art which had now become Nature-Cowper mingles up his fate with that of the drowned sailor of Anson's ship. He cannot help beginning in the first person; realizing the terrible night and the swift ruin as his own. He makes himself the sailor :

Obscurest night involved the sky,
The Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I,
Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.

He changes then to description in the third person, but we feel as we read of the long struggle of the swimmer, "supported by despair of life;" as he describes the pitiless blast which forbade his friends to rescue him, the useless succour of the cask and cord which served only to prolong his agony, the bitter thought that they were right to leave him-that we are looking into the heart of Cowper's life. With what exquisite simplicity of words, and yet with what a grasp of misery, is the next verse conceived

He long survives, who lives an hour

In Ocean, self-upheld;

And so long he, with unspent power,

His destiny repelled;

And ever as the minutes flew

Entreated help, or cried Adieu.

We are now relieved by a change from the doom of the sailor to the grief of Anson for his fate, and then, in a sudden rushing of misery, in which the impassioned

imagination rises almost into a wild cry, and the verse in the last two lines becomes abrupt, and the voice choked, he again dashes himself into the fate of the sailor, and both perish in the seas:

No voice divine the storm allayed,

No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone ;

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

The poetic life of Cowper lies between this poem at the end, and those terrible Sapphics at the beginning. He entered it in despair, he left it in despair. For a time, during which he wrote most of the Olney Hymns, he enjoyed the sense of that "assurance" of salvation on which his friend Newton dwelt so much, and the humble ecstasy of some of the hymns is wonderfully touching. But the lines which have found a place in every hymn book

"God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform," etc.

mark the close of this period and prophesy the relapse which followed. When the attack was over, he never recovered his sense of acceptance with God. He even learned to acquiesce, at times, in God's condemnation of him to eternal misery. But the weight of this dreadful belief did not always oppress him. It came and went like dark clouds upon an April day of sunshine, and till the last three years, his life had many intervals of happiness. Many lovely landscapes lay between these three valleys of

the Shadow of Death, where he rested and was at peace; sweet idleness and fruitful contemplation-tender friendships and simple pleasures-hours where charming humour and simple pathos ran through one another, and interchanged their essence like the colours on a sun-set seadays of sweet fidelity to Nature in her quietest and most restoring moods-times when the peace that passeth all understanding made him as a child with God; but in the end the darkness settled down, deep and impenetrable: and the Poet, who of all English Artists, has written, to my mind, the noblest hymns for depth of religious feeling and for loveliness of quiet style; whose life was blameless as the water-lilies which he loved, and the way of life of which on silent streams he made his own; whose heart breathed the sweetest air of natural piety, and yet could sympathize with the supersensuous world in which Guyon lived-died in ghastly hopelessness, refusing comfort to the last. On the physician asking how he felt, he answered, "I feel unutterable despair." It is a strange commentary on the demand which the school of his friend Newton make, that on the death-bed there should be, or else one may scarcely dare to hope, a triumphant confession of faith.

LECTURE IV.

COLERIDGE.

COLERIDGE has not written much poetry, but he has written a great deal of theology. We know him as a theologian and his views, and the difficulty, of course, in such a lecture as this, which keeps strictly to the theology in his poetry, is to prevent oneself from slipping into discussion of his philosophic prose, and to think and speak of him only as a poet. I shall try to get what I have to say about his poetic view of Nature, Man, and God, into one lecture.

First, he too, with the rest of the God-fearing English poets, saw in the proclamation of the revolutionary ideas the revelation of God; saw that the truth of universal brotherhood, and of the right of the meanest man to cqual liberty, followed on and ought to be founded on the truth of God's universal Fatherhood. And when the first bright outburst of the Revolution took place, Coleridge was the poet who sang it with the stormiest glee and passion; something of the "storm and stress" (Sturm und Drang) period in Germany marks his verses, a violence of words and ideas, as if the more noise the more expression. Such lines as these show what I mean,—

Thus to sad sympathies I soothed my breast,
Calm as the rainbow in the weeping West:
When slumbering Freedom roused by high Disdain
With giant fury burst her triple chain!

Fierce on her front the blasting Dog-star glowed;
Her banners, like a midnight meteor, flowed;
Amid the yelling of the storm-rent skies

She came, and scattered battles from her eyes!

They are poor, but still they have a certain strength which will mellow-it is a shout of triumph, it is not the sensational shriek which exhausts itself. And they had a real enthusiasm at their root, that enthusiasm which delights to challenge established beliefs, as when Coleridge claimed heaven as the right of Chatterton the suicide; which is full of wild projects, as when with Southey and some others he planned their communistic expedition, and society on the banks of the Susquehanna, where he hoped to realize his new dreams of human peace and equality,

O'er the ocean swell

Sublime of Hope I seek the cottage dell,

Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray;
And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,
The wizard Passions weave a holy spell.

O, Chatterton that thou wert yet alive

Sure thou would'st spread the canvas to the gale
And love with us the tinkling team to drive,
O'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale.

And it was an enthusiasm which, taking fire from the fire of the world, made him think, in the hope and joy which filled his heart, that all things were possible to faith so strong, and aspiration so intense; but which failed in expressing itself, at least at first, with any of the poetic force that is the child of temperance.