Or to the distant eye displays, Fraught with a transient frozen shower, The fisher seeks his 'custom'd nook, And stretch'd among the daises pied Yet, in these presages rude, COWPER. 1731-1800. PRINCIPAL WORKS:-A volume of poems, 1782, comprising the pieces entitled Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Tirocinium or a Review of Schools, Truth, Hope, Conversation.-The Task, 1785, immediately received with extraordinary favour. Compared with by far the greater part of the so-called poetry of the day, it was the language of nature and truth.-Translation of the Iliad, 1791, and an only partially accomplished edition of Milton.-The Castaway, composed not long before his death. The reputation of Cowper rests mainly upon The Task, the most considerable as well as most valuable of his productions. It was the second great poem inspired by a true worship of Nature, and celebrating the charms of the sights and sounds of the fields and woods; and the authors of The Seasons and The Task may be regarded together as the two great landscape painters' of English poetry. Their distinctive peculiarities have already been hinted at in the brief sketch of Thomson's career. The one excels in enthusiasm: the other in the greater correctness of his diction: the one in the splendour and richness of his colouring, the other in the correctness of his drawing. As to the somewhat different sources of their inspiration, Coleridge has remarked that the love of Nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of Nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into Nature; the other flies to Nature from his fellow-men.' Using the term ' religion' in its received and conventional sense, as equivalent to 'theology,' Cowper's religious opinions appear to have been of the ordinary orthodox type, though, doubtless, with him a real feeling; but, interpreting the word in its better sense, as the creed, or rather practice, of justice, truth, and humanity, the religion of the author of The Task will be allowed to have been the most exalted and noble that can well be imagined. Excepting Thomson and Shelley, no poet has given expression to so noble a profession of faith, and with so much apparent earnestness, as Cowper. However, then, it may have been with the theological prejudices of education or temperament, the traditional creed; in all that belongs to reality his religion may well be thought to have been of the most practical kind. 'His former poems were often rugged in style and expression, and were made so on purpose, to avoid the polished uniformity of Pope and his imitators. He was now sensible that he had erred on the opposite side, and accordingly The Task was made to unite strength and freedom with elegance and harmony. No poet has introduced so much idiomatic expression into a grave poem of blank verse; but the higher passages are all carefully finished, and rise or fall, according to the nature of the subject with inimitable grace and melody. In this respect Cowper has greatly the advantage of Thomson, whose stately march is never relaxed, however trivial be the theme. The variety of The Task in style and manner, no less than in subject, is one of its greatest charms. The mock heroic opening is a fine specimen of his humour, and from this he slides into rural description and moral reflection so naturally and easily, that the reader is carried along apparently without an effort. The scenery of the Ouse--its level plains and spacious meads, is described with the vividness of painting. . . . From the beginning to the end of The Task we never lose sight of the author. His love of country rambles, his walks with Mrs. Unwin, when he had exchanged the Thames for the Ouse, and had "grown sober in the vale of years;" his playful satire and tender admonition, his denunciation of slavery, his noble patriotism, his devotional earnestness and sublimity, his warm sympathy with his fellow-men, and his exquisite paintings of domestic peace and happiness, are all so much self-portraiture, drawn with the ripe taste and skill of the master, yet with a modesty that shrinks from the least obtrusiveness and display. (Cyclopedia of English Literature.) In his great work the popular religionism is not so offensively obtruded as in most of his lesser poems. The wisdom which he imbibed from his silent communings with Nature had doubtless corrected in great measure if it had not altogether obliterated, the early prejudices of education and tradition, intensified, as they were, by that terrible malady which darkened the life of one of the most estimable of thinkers and writers. THE TASK. ART AND NATURE. LOVELY indeed the mimic works of Art, Than please the eye-sweet Nature every sense. The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales, Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast; His cheek recovers soon its healthful hue, He walks, he leaps, he runs-is wing'd with joy, He does not scorn it, who has long endured The Sofa. NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM. OH for a lodge in some vast wilderness, |