as the "man that had been in hell." Only one who had had the direst and most peculiar experience could have written large portions of his poetry. He has, indeed, cast it into ideal forms, and expressed it, as we have seen, in language thoroughly sane and simple. But just as the agonies of the hero of the Grace Abounding are seen heaving below the cloak of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress, so "The Expostulation," "The Castaway," and much of "The Task," of Cowper, form a striking variation of his "Narrative." You see in his poetry a mind naturally strong, which has by agony been intensely sharpened, and which, leaving behind it the incoherence and the fury, has retained the insight and inspiration of madness. Many of us remember, after recovering from a protracted fever, the feeling of newness which saluted our every sense, bathed our being as in fresh oil, and made nature assume an aspect of more than spring or summer splendour, so that we heard a melody in the "humming of the fly on the summer wall, and in the slightest murmur of creeping waters," and saw every flower and blade of grass, standing or bending down, as if springing up in or surcharged with glory. Cowper had emerged from the gulf of a far fiercer malady, and nature and all things became to him for a season "new;" and that novel, rich, and tender gleam of insight having once shone across his spirit, never fully died into the light of common day. Terrible was the process by which his eyes were couched; but, once open, they were never altogether shut again till the darkness of death arrived.

Fresh, fearless, and strong, are always the thought and the imagery of Cowper. You can hardly open his poetic works without encountering one of those marked and memorable sentences, which look up from the page like eyes, and which you know have long since become proverbs. Such sentences strike you the more, because they are not cast into the artificial form of aphorism or antithesis. They are just bold, blunt truths, uttered in words as few as forcible. Here is a picture, for instance,

“The naked shoots,

Barren as lances."

And another

"The primrose, ere her time,

Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root."

Here is a thought—

"Meditation here

May think down hours to moments."

Here is an image, now familiar, but to Cowper quite new

"One Spirit-His

Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows―

Rules universal nature."

Here is a descant on music, competent only to a poet

"There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave.
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still,
Clear and sonorous, as the gale came on!"

Better still what follows

"With easy force it opens all the cells
Where memory slept."

Here are two striking fancies-

"The villas with which London stands begirt,
Like a swarth Indian with his belt of beads."

"Fancy, like the finger of a clock,

Runs the great circle, and is still at home."

How exquisitely natural, yet wholly unexpected, these lines in his verses "On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture "

"Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more-
Children not thine have trode my nursery floor.”

But time would fail us to enumerate the tithe of the true and manly, pointed and forcible sayings, which stamp Cowper a Fountain Mind, one in whom extensive culture had

not killed but strengthened his native powers, and in whose poetry, while he brought out from his treasures, like the wise householder, things new and old, the new always held a large preponderance over the old, alike in quantity and in quality, in value and in brilliance.

6thly, Cowper's poetry is sincere-" a true thing "—the direct utterance of a full and fervid heart, itself penetrated with the love, the grief, the yearning desire, the anger, and the fury which he has made musical in his verse.

"Idly feign'd poetic pains,

Arcadian raptures quaint and tame,"

No

Even those

are those he has expressed in his poetry. He speaks as he is moved he lived before the time when affected passion was thought a necessary element of poetry. "I have put my heart in my poetry," said Ebenezer Elliott. Cowper has put a far deeper heart in still more earnest song. who differ most widely from his creed, are compelled to respect his sincerity. A soul true to its own convictions, and fearlessly expressing them, is a sight so rare in this world, that all except the very basest of the race have agreed to admire it. It is this which has secured a certain esteem even for Shelley, amidst all his fearful errors and frenzied blasphemies. He was as earnest as a flame of fire. But when you find in a poet earnestness united with reverence, his genius becomes truly a pearl of great price, and you not only acknowledge him to be gifted and great, but listen to him as to a preacher of righteousness. Cowper's earnestness has been accused of fanaticism, and we are not careful to deny that now and then it exceeds the bounds of sober sense and of Christian candour; but this is not a frequent case; and when you remember his story, you are disposed to forgive him. The man had himself been half-consumed by the unquenchable fire, and you excuse a little over-urgency in his attempts to prevent others from falling into it. The man's own garment had been spotted by the flesh, and hence the vehemence and fury of his hatred against it. The man had been in the outer, nay, the outmost darkness; and in seeking to save others from it, no wonder

though at times, like Jeremiah, "his heart is broken within him, his bones shake, and he is like a drunken man because of the Lord and the words of his holiness." Yet this fury is blended with deep compassion, and with childlike tenderness. Against sin in high places, against proud and purple-clad hypocrisy, against cruelty, affectation, and every variety of gilded sham, his motto is, "Spare no arrows -his ire is unmixed and inexorable; but on poor transgressors, on the victims of circumstances, on the slaves of a peculiar temperament, and on men of genius, misled by meteor lights, he looks with sympathy, pity, and forgiveness. It is this spirit of sincerity which has rendered the political bursts of his poetry so powerful. He is far too honest to be a partizan. He deals blows on both sides, at Whigs and Tories, kings and people, with the like energy and gusto. George III. he respected, partly because he was a pious man, and partly because he loved the "Task." But he was anything but a sycophant even to him. Modern patriots, on the other hand, he abominated for their profligacy and selfish ambition. His pique at Fox we can excuse, but he discovers a deep-rooted prejudice at Burke which we cannot comprehend, the rather as Burke had not only powers which must have commanded his reverence, but all that moral excellence which he desiderated in his associates. Still, as a whole, Cowper has done more than any poet since Milton to circulate the love of liberty—sound, rational, constitutional liberty, through the middle classes of his country.

We name as the last general element in his poetry, its religious and evangelical spirit. He is still, even after Montgomery, Grahame, and Pollok, the Laureate of Evangelicalism. He has set, not high Calvinism, but that moderate form of the system which has prevailed in a section of the English Church, to the fine music of his song. He has thus at once done essential service to the cause of Evangelical Christianity, and given an additional proof of the energy of his own genius. When Cowper arose, Christianity in its Evangelical shape, at least, was thought inimical to all that was beautiful in art, to poetry, and to the Belles Lettres, a

dry, morose, and unhappy thing, unsusceptible either of defence from science, or of decoration from literature. Johnson, indeed, had by the overwhelming influence of his talents, and by his fearless advocacy of the general principles of religion, done much to rescue it from the assaults of profane witlings, and to make it respectable in the eyes of those who did not revere or believe it. But Johnson could scarcely be called distinctively Evangelical in his sentiments, and his life was rather careless. There was needed one who to high genius should unite profound belief in the peculiarities of Evangelical doctrines, and a thoroughly consistent walk and conversation; and that champion was found among the willows of the Ouse. Cowper came into the field with fresh and burning convictions, with the zeal of a new convert, with a determination springing from the very depth of his misery, and with the mind and manner of a great original. He was clad, indeed, in sombre armour, but he carried the Cross upon a fair white shield, and felt neither fear nor shame. He took up many of the most reviled and despised doctrines in the Evangelícal creed, and defended them with a power only paralleled by his sincerity and his daring. He proclaimed the stone rejected by the builders to be the head of the corner. He attacked the prevalent vices and gaieties of society, with the keenest sarcasm, blended and flanked by strong invective and indignant protest. He treated the world as a hollow delusion, and pointed all who were disgusted by it to another and a better, and sought to set

"Lama sabachthani before their eyes."

He spared not the frivolous and idle clergy of his day; indeed, he swept his poetry like a scythed chariot, through every class in which he found pride, vanity, folly, or vice. Had he been a Dissenter, his verse would have been treated as the effusion of sectarian spleen. But the fact that he was a devout member of the Church, secured him the ears of many of her children. Had he sprung from the ranks, the charge of vulgarity would have been preferred against him, and in that conventional age would have crushed his writings. But