...

herself rather the remote and visionary regions of fiction than that of dull reality, we are disposed to think that, even in her wildest wanderings, she will maintain no real or permanent ascendency over the mind if she widely deviates from nature and good sense. "Monstrous sights," says Beattie, and he might have added, monstrous conceptions, "please but for a moment, if they please at all; for they derive their charm merely from the beholder's amazement. To say of any thing that it is 'contrary to nature,' denotes censure and disgust on the part of the speaker; as the epithet 'natural' intimates an agreeable quality, and seems, for the most part, to imply that a thing is as it ought to be, suitable to our own taste, and congenial to our own disposition. . . . Think how we should relish a painting in which there was no regard to colors, proportions, or any of the physical laws of nature; where the eyes and ears of animals were placed in their shoulders, where the sky was green, and the grass crimson." Such distortions and anomalies would not be less offensive in poetry than in the sister art. And it is one of the main sources of delight in Cowper that all is in its due proportion, and wears its right colors; that the " ' eyes and ears" are in "their proper places;" that his skies are blue, and his grass is green; and that every reflection of the poet has, what he himself calls, the "stamp and clear impression of good sense.'

The very passage in the Sixth Book of "The Task," "from which this line is taken, and which furnishes, perhaps, the most perfect delineation of a true Christian, supplies, at the same time, an admirable example of the quality we mean; and shows that even where his feelings were the most intensely interested, his passions were under the control of his reason; that, when he mounted the chariot of the sun, he took care not to approach too near the flaming luminary.

It would be impossible, in a sketch such as this, not to advert to the powers of the author as a satirist. And here, we think, the most partial critic will be scarcely disposed to deny that he sometimes handles his knife a little at random, and with too

much severity. He had early in life been intimate with Churchill; and with scarcely a touch of the temper of that right English poet, had plainly caught something of his manner. There is this wide distinction between him and his master-that his irony and rebuke are never the weapons of party or personality, but of truth, honor, and the public good. The strong, though homely image, applied by Churchill to another critic,

"Like a butcher, doomed for life

In his mouth to wear his knife,”

is too just a picture of its author, but is infinitely far from being that of Cowper. It was well said of his satire, that “it was the offspring of benevolence; and that, like the Pelian spear, it furnishes the only cure for the wound it inflicts. When he is obliged to blame, he pities: when he condemns, it is with regret. His censures display no triumphant superiority, but rather express a turn of feeling such as we might suppose angels to indulge in at the prospect of human frailty.”

But, if his satirical powers were sometimes indulged to excess, it is impossible to deny that he was, generally and habitually, of all poets the most sympathizing and tender. Nothing in human composition can surpass the tenderness of the poem on receiving his mother's picture (inserted at the end of this volume), or of those exquisite lines addressed to a Protestant lady in France suffering under deep calamity.

The hymns are almost uniformly of the same character. Drawn from the deep recesses of a broken heart, they find a short and certain way to the bosom of others.

And this leads to the notice of another peculiarity of his writings. It is said to have been a favorite maxim of Lord Byron, "that every writer is interesting to others in proportion as he is able and willing to seize and to display to them the hidden workings of his own soul." The noble critic is himself a strong exemplification of the truth of his own rule. Not merely his heroes and his heroines, but his rocks, mountains, and rivers,

are a sort of fac-simile of himself. The blue lake reposing among the mountains is the bard in a state of repose. The thunder leaping from rock to rock is the same mind under the strong excitement of passion. But, perhaps, of all writers Cowper is the most habitually what may be termed an experimentalist in poetry. He sought in "the man within," the secret machinery by which to touch and to control the world without. He felt deeply, and caught the feeling as it rose, and transferred it warm from the heart to his own paper. Hence one great attraction of his writings. The sensations of other men are to a great degree our own; and the poetical exhibition of these sensations is the presenting to us a sort of illuminated mirror in which we see ourselves, and are, according to the view, moved to sorrow or to joy. Preachers as well as poets will do well to remember this law of our nature, and will endeavor to analyze and to delineate their own feelings if they mean to reach those of others. Unhappily, the noble author of this canon in philosophy and literature had no very profitable picture of this kind to display to his fellow. men. He has taught, however, no unimportant lesson to his species, if he has instructed us in the utter wretchedness of those who, gifted with the noblest powers, refuse to consecrate them to the glorious Giver. But, however unprofitable his own application of the rule, the rule itself is valuable; and, in the case of Cowper, we have the application of it, both on the largest scale and to the best possible purpose.

It has been the habit with many to assign to Cowper only a second or third place in the scale of poets, on the ground that he is, according to their estimate, altogether "incapable of the true sublime." Now, it must be admitted that, if the only true sublimity in writing be to write like Milton, Cowper cannot be ranked in the same class as a poet. Of Milton it may be said in the words of a poet as great as himself—

"He doth bestride the world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs."

Nothing can be more astonishing than the composure and dignity with which, like his own Satan, he climbs the "empyreal height"-sails between world and world-and moves among thrones and principalities as if in his natural element. "The genius of Cowper," as it has been justly said, "did not lead him to emulate the songs of the seraphim;" but, though in one respect he moves in a lower region than his great master, in what may be termed the "moral sublime," he is by no means inferior to him. Scarcely any poetry awakens in the mind more of those deep emotions of " 'pity and terror," which the great critic of antiquity describes as the main sources of the sublime; and by which poetry is said to “ purge the mind of her votaries." In this view of the sublime we know of few passages which surpass the description of "liberty of soul," in the conclusion of the Fifth Book of the Task, 883-906.

It is superfluous to enter upon a detailed proof that Cowper's poems in rhyme, though occasionally brightened by passages of extraordinary merit, are often prosaic in their character, and halting and feebie in the versification: that his shorter poems, whether of a gay or of a doctrinal cast, are, for the pathos, wit, delicacy of conception, and felicity of expression, unequalled in our language; that his Homer is an evidence, not of his incapacity as a translator, but of the impossibility of transmuting into stiff unyielding English monosyllables the rich compounds of the Greek, without a sacrifice both of sound and sense; that "The Task" outruns in power, variety, depth of thought, fertility of imagination, vigor of expression, in short, in all that constitutes a poet of the highest order, every hope which his earlier poems had allowed his readers to indulge.

On the whole, his "Poems" will always be considered as one of the richest legacies which genius and virtue have bequeathed to mankind; and will be welcomed wherever the English language is known, and English minds, tastes, and habits prevail; wherever the approbation of what is good, and the abhorrence of what is evil is felt; wherever truth is honored, and God and his creatures loved.