the enemies of his creed could not deny the purity of his blood. Had he been a mediocre writer, the dulness of his verse would have neutralized its earnestness. But those who reviled the theologian, were forced to capitulate to the poet. From the various advantages he possessed, sprung his sudden and permanent influence. He made religion almost fashionable; he stifled the sneers which had long been current against Evangelicalism; he inspired awe where he did not produce conviction, and

"Fools who came to laugh remain'd to pray.”

He has thus, too, proved the power of his own genius. To make religion popular in a "world lying in wickedness" is no easy task. The religious poet necessarily deprives himself of many of the conditions of popularity. He dares not trifle except on very rare occasions, he dares not appeal to the bad, low, and selfish parts of human nature; he becomes thus like an artist, who, without a box of colours, is compelled to trust to his power of design and of outline alone. It is no difficult matter for a reckless man of genius like Moore or Byron, to supply spice to his readers; to tickle or lull them at his pleasure; to shed stimulating drugs of death into his compounds; and to render them as delicious as they are deleterious; as sweet in the mouth as they are bitter in the belly. Cowper, had he been a profane or licentious man, had wit enough to have indited a Don Juan, and genius enough to have heated a seven-times hotter furnace than Cain, and misery enough to have inspired him with groans as melodious and as terrible as those of Childe Harold or Prometheus Unbound. But from all such attempts to snatch a false and polluted power he shrank with abhorrence. He took up, instead, the old and (as it seemed to many) dull subject of religion; he surrounded it with nothing but natural flowers; he pled its cause, not by art, but by earnestness; and in spite of the devil, the world, and the flesh, he compelled mankind to listen-some indeed to gnaw their tongues for pain-but more to love, to bless, and to admire the fearless Bard.

His influence was not confined to individuals or to the

public generally; it extended to authors, and particularly to poets. With very few exceptions, our poets since have respected, if not taught, morality and religion in their writings. What Johnson and Burke effected among our prose writers, Cowper did among the tuneful tribe. We need only name in proof of this,-besides those, who like Montgomery, Grahame, and Pollok, may be regarded as disciples in the school he founded the Lakers. These eminent men, although differing from Cowper in many points of faith-all have, like him, expressed in verse their belief in Christianity, and are distinguished by their high moral and spiritual tone of thought, and by their abhorrence of every species of rhymed ribaldry or blasphemy set to music.

Cowper has done something more. He has shattered the credit of the absurd dictum of the great lexicographer against sacred poetry. It had been, we believe, answered before, as it has been often since, Cowper's time, but he gave the real answer to it. He did so by writing admirable sacred verse. Johnson had said "the doctrines and peculiarities of our religion cannot be turned to poetical account." Cowper proceeded to turn them to high poetical account, and there was no more to be done or said in the matter. Others struck at the solemn and solid-seeming paradox-Cowper walked through it, broke it to pieces, and came out on the other side.

We have now gone over our list of the excellencies of Cowper's poetry. And yet we must even, although by a breach of method, name one other quality of a very marked kind-we mean its thoroughly English character. Cowper was, intus et in cute, an Englishman, and his poetry contains the refined essence of John Bullism. Its manliness, its clearness, its avoidance of mist and mysticism, its bluntness, its dogged sincerity, its prejudices, and its patriotic glow, are all characteristic of his native nook of earth; and well might he indite that line, so noble in its simple strength

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still."

Even as England had and has its faults, so has the poetry of one of its most popular authors. Cowper's principal defect

is, perhaps, that of music. He has, indeed, written many melodious verses, but his verse, on the whole, wants that springy elastic motion, those finely-managed sinkings and swellings of sound, which distinguish the musical masters of the lyre. His model in rhyme is Dryden, if not Churchill; but he is much inferior in fiery dashing speed, in careless grandeur, in splendid negligence, in

"The long-resounding march, and energy divine,"

to glorious John. His model for blank verse is Milton; but though he keenly appreciated, he has failed to reproduce the merits of Milton's verse, its artistic use of accents, and selection of words; its adaptation of sound to sense, and those great choral harmonies which surge on, like indivisible waves of music. He succeeds best in the regular "ding dong" of the ballad and the smaller lyric.

We may also charge Cowper's poetry with want of artistic finish and epic completeness. He is not so much an artist as he is a prophet. He has so much to say, that he is comparatively indifferent as to how he says it. A spirit from the dead needs not to wear superb draperies, or to be anxious about the arrangement of his shadowy attire. Cowper has a message from the Eternal to utter, and if he does not always remember to deliver it in accordance with the rules of art and the requirements of regular composition, let him be forgiven on account of the intensity of his purpose. He did indulge sometimes in careless combinations of language -in rugged rhythm-in blunt and coarse images; and there is often an impatience in his mode of hurrying from theme to theme, instead of the grand calm which should. distinguish the series of events or thoughts characterizing a complete poem. But he aspired to be a didactic lyrist; and this class of poets are, more than any other, entitled to certain immunities, especially if their lyre be crossed at times by the fiery fingers of a Supernal Hand, and if their melodies rise to the blended influences of genius and of God.

That Cowper was a prophet, in that supreme sense in which

the bards of the Bible were, we are far from maintaining. We mean simply, that he possessed a subordinate measure of the same earnestness, insight, and holy boldness; and of this he was himself aware. He says, for instance,

“A terrible sagacity informs

The poet's heart-he looks to distant storms;
He hears the thunder ere the tempest lowers."

And in the poem-say rather the torrent of sanctified anger, the molten series of questions, called "Expostulation "-he dares to compare himself to one of the ancient prophets of Israel, as well as to liken the people he was accusing to the stiff-necked and rebellious nation whom they rebuked. And yet no one would have been more disposed and eager to admit his inferiority to them, and to bow his head in humility and awe before the "glory of their nostrils, which is terrible;" the weight of their wisdom; the vast compass of their insight; the "burdens" which, while pressing them down, bruised nations and empires below them; and that immediate communication which they have alone enjoyed with the Fountain of Light, the Father of Spirits, the God that answereth by fire.

We close, by making a few remarks on the principal of his poems. His first volume is more characteristic of his piety and strong intellect than of his fancy, heart, eloquence, or pathos. It is full of stern, sententious maxims, unified by the spirit of his earnestness, and rather to be regarded as arrows piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, than as artistic efforts. Read in the reflex light of "The Task," we see not only their force but their fittingness, because a popular author may use liberties and dare darings not to be taken or excused in others. Coming, however, as they did, originally from an unknown writer, we cannot wonder that their effect on the public was somewhat repulsive, and that many shrank from the apparent impertinence of an author who took up at once a tone so independent, so authoritative, and so fiercely accusatory. Yet nowhere do we now see more of the keenness, point, knowledge of human nature, and

to terror.

energy of moral sentiment, characteristic of Cowper, than in those poems" Truth," "Hope," "Charity," and the rest. "The Task reminds us of the proverb, "Lucus a non lucendo." It is very little, indeed, of a task to read this most delightful of poems, which we may almost call the moral and religious Don Juan, resembling it in its quick and easy transitions from grave to gay; from the serious to the satiric; from wit to pathos; from pathos to sublimity; and from sublimity You seem now reclining on a sofa, and now standing on a prophetic summit. Ease and energy were never more thoroughly reconciled. The slipshod, the strong, the bitter, the tender, the grand, the humorous, and the religious, melt into each other like snow into snow, or like dreams into dreams. It is a picture, perfect and whole-length, of the poet's life and thoughts, his feelings, hopes, and faiths; and therein lies its power. "Tirocinium is more a daguerreotype, drawn by memory, of certain past painful passages in Cowper's own history, than a complete statement of the pros and cons on the subject of Private versus Public Education. Yet its vigour, and, within certain limits, its truth, are unquestionable. His minor poems are remarkable for their number, their shortness, their simplicity, and the fine edge which he often unexpectedly, and by a single word, gives to what seemed an obvious thought. Like his own Vinny Bourne, he seems to have the key into the soul of beasts and insects, and to be able, like that Carpathian shepherd in Johnson's splendid fable of "The Vultures," to understand the language of the birds of prey. His "Castaway," and many more, are just the wringings of his miserable heart. Best of all are his "John Gilpin" and his "Lines on the Receipt of a Mother's Picture "-two productions, the one of which has excited more laughter, and the other started more tears, than, perhaps, any two poems of the same compass in the world, and which alone might have established his name as one of the truest and greatest of British Poets.