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characteristic of the six. It is full of good things: the portraits of the postman and the waggoner, Dutch in their sincerity and wealth of detail, something more than Dutch in their imaginative sympathy; the curious account of the newspaper of the day; the invocations of Winter and Evening, the latter perhaps the most elaborate of Cowper's efforts in the Miltonic manner, but both fine things, and gaining a new interest by Blake's beautiful designs with which the kindness of Mr. Johnson allows me to illustrate them; the picture of himself dreaming unashamed before the red cinders, like Wordsworth

"Without emotion, hope, or aim,

In the loved presence of his cottage fire;'

"

the snowstorm; the cottage interior; the inn, and the Militia ballot; and, finally, the suburban villa and the window-box, which are called in to prove

"That man, immured in cities, still retains

His inborn inextinguishable thirst

Of rural scenes.'

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The link between them all is the ever-present personality of the poet. No one was ever less abstract. Of things in themselves he knows nothing, and has nothing to say; his tale is always of things as he has heard, seen, experienced, above all, felt them. That is really the essence of the difference between him and Thomson, over so much of whose ground he travels. Cowper is the master of personal experience and detail: as Sainte-Beuve says, at the end of the second of his three appreciative essays "il a l'exactitude presque minutieuse." On the other hand, "il y a des masses chez Thomson." Thomson has indeed many } great qualities. He is a poet of greater mental range and power than Cowper; he has more sustained energy; and he gets and uses the full benefit of a wider life and a broader creed. When he preaches or moralizes it is as a man, not as an Evangelical sectary. But he is almost entirely without Cowper's note of direct sincerity, of personal feeling. He will take us through a catalogue of descriptions borrowed from works of travel or science, such as "Dr. Mead's elegant book on that subject," dressing up for us the usual lions, crocodiles, and the rest, in the established rhetorical manner. Cowper, on the other hand, needs no books, for he never leaves the field of his own experience. He talks of Olney, not of Africa; of hares and sheep, not of serpents or hyenas; of the Ouse, not the Nile. And this close clinging to his own life and haunts must have helped to bring out the best of his gifts, that in which he so far surpasses Thomson, the intimacy and tenderness of

* Causeries du Lundi, xi. 177.

his sympathy. Compare, for instance, his snowstorm in this book with Thomson's. Here is the passage from "Winter:

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Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes

Fall broad, and wide, and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all: save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and, ere the languid sun,
Faint from the west, emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,
Is one wild, dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man.'

Now hear Cowper :

"How calm is my recess, and how the frost,
Raging around, and the rough wind, endear
The silence and the warmth enjoyed within!
I saw the woods and fields at close of day
A variegated show: the meadows green,
Though faded; and the lands where lately waved
The golden harvest, of a mellow brown,
Upturned so lately by the forceful share:
I saw far off the weedy fallows smile
With verdure not unprofitable, grazed
By flocks, fast feeding, and selecting each
His favourite herb; while all the leafless groves,
That skirt the horizon, wore a sable hue,
Scarce noticed in the kindred dusk of eve.
To-morrow brings a change, a total change!
Which even now, though silently performed
And slowly, and by most unfelt, the face
Of universal nature undergoes.

Fast falls a fleecy shower. The downy flakes
Descending, and, with never-ceasing lapse,
Softly alighting upon all below,

Assimilate all objects. Earth receives

Gladly the thickening mantle, and the

green

And tender blade that feared the chilling blast
Escapes unhurt beneath so warm a veil.”

Both descriptions have been eclipsed in vividness by the wonderful "London Snow" of Mr. Bridges: but why, of the two, does Cowper carry us with him so much more completely than

Thomson? The answer must be, I think, that it is because Thomson is, on the whole, outside his subject, and Cowper is entirely and absolutely a part of his. Thomson's snow falls on the haunts of imaginary shepherds; Cowper's on the fields between Olney and Weston. And how he invites our confidence from the first, by the convincing personal touches: "My recess," "I saw," "at close of day," "even now," "to-morrow"! He makes us his

companions all the while. And, admirable as is the passage which follows in Thomson, with the labourer-ox and the fowls of heaven, the robin and the hare, has it ever the note of personal feeling which Cowper found for the animals? or, to keep to the lines I have quoted, has Thomson ever the secret of that tenderness with which Cowper speaks of the earth lying warm and quiet under the protecting snow? The fact is, Cowper's heart lies open in every line he wrote; we do not often get behind Thomson's mind. He is a poet who means to show the town how well he can write; and while he gains by knowing, what Cowper scarcely knows, that poetry demands a certain heightening, a something above the thoughts and feelings of the common hours of commonplace people, he loses at times by the very effort to act on that knowledge. If Cowper suffers sometimes by not taking himself and his work seriously enough, Thomson equally suffers by too great a sense of the importance of the Seasons and their poet. Art and industry are with him too all-pervading, too incessant; he cannot lie still in Nature's hands, as Cowper can in his best moments, letting her take the pen from him and write in his place.

The fifth book is again less interesting. It begins with a wonderful winter landscape, touches of which, such as—

"The cattle mourn in corners where the fence

Screens them, and seem half-petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness,"

have the sombre beauty of a fine Crome. But the poet soon digresses, in his casual way, from the icicles of Nature to the icepalace of the Empress Elizabeth, and so to tyrants, and liberty, and, finally, to the other and greater liberty which looks beyond earth for its home. A large part of the book is occupied with his political feelings, which were a generous expansion of the Whig tradition. He prays for the fall of the Bastille, for the abolition of slavery, for the reform of the laws which filled the debtors' prisons. But on the more immediate politics of the hour he is less clear-sighted, never has a good word for the Whig Opposition, and never seems to have understood that George III. was aiming at a revival of the personal monarchy which his admired Revolution had risked everything to destroy. Probably he was blinded by admiration of the king's moral character, and detestation of that of Fox.

The last book begins admirably again with that delightful line

"There is in souls a sympathy with sounds,”

which, of all the men of that day, Cowper alone could have written ; and it goes on to the fine "Walk at Noon," from which it has its name, and which is of that peculiar quality in which no one before or since has equalled Cowper. Greater men have given us greater things; but this particular thing belongs to William Cowper, and not to any greater or smaller man. And how delightful it is!

"The night was winter in his roughest mood,
The morning sharp and clear.
But now at noon,

Upon the southern side of the slant hills,

And where the woods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles, resigning all its rage,

And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue
Without a cloud, and white without a speck
The dazzling splendour of the scene below.
Again the harmony comes o'er the vale,
And through the trees I view the embattled tower
Whence all the music. I again perceive
The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
And settle in soft musings as I tread

The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.
The roof, though moveable through all its length
As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed,
And intercepting in their silent fall
The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.
No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.

The red-breast warbles still, but is content

With slender notes, and more than half suppressed;
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light

From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendant drops of ice
That tinkle in the withered leaves below.
Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,
Charms more than silence."

The signature of Cowper is on every line, almost on every word. Its quietness is his, its sincerity, its moving quality, its wealth of detail. He has noticed everything-the path "still verdant," the "moveable roof" swaying in the wind, the "slender" note of the robin, and his light flitting from spray to spray, the ice "tinkling" on the crisp withered leaves as it falls. And he has made everything his own, harmonized it all, extracted from it the particular poetic effect of which he had the secret. Who in all the long line

of our poets could have done it better, or rather, who could have done this particular thing at all?

The rest of the book, which contains some of the best passages in the poem, passes on from some more exquisite little landscapes, and some charming bits of self-revelation, to a long appeal for kindness to animals, and finally to a vision of the new heaven and new earth of his faith, in which fraud and cruelty would be known no more. There he must, on the whole, be held to fail: he has neither the profundity of mind nor the greatness of style called for by such a theme. Here, too, as elsewhere, the narrowness of his creed is in his way. Poetry demands a freedom of movement to which all systems of scientific theology are alike fatal. They present the poet with a map, on which all is precisely defined, with no escape outside its borders. With that, unless he be Dante, he can do nothing. What he needs is no measured map, but a landscape with an opening through which he may let his eyes and his dreams journey away into an infinite distance, of which he knows little except that it is the goal and home of his highest desires. Dante has indeed known how to unite the dogmatic precision of a mediæval schoolman with a sublimity of imagination no poet has ever surpassed. But the "Paradise is a unique achievement. For Milton's most inspiring visions of a spiritual world, it is not to any of the theological passages that we must go, but to such things as the end of "Lycidas," or the "Blest Pair of Sirens," or the noble lines with which "Comus" opens.

For the rest, the book is, perhaps, the most striking evidence of the way in which Cowper "half perceived and half created" the humanitarian reforms which were to be brought about by the generation that was growing up at his death. Few poets have had more direct influence. He must not, of course, be given the credit of what was mainly accomplished by a great religious movement; but, while he owed a great deal of his popularity to the enthusiasm of those who shared his religious views, the Evangelicals owed a great deal to the poet who carried their doctrines into places not to be reached by any preacher's voice. No books ever contained more about the clergy or less about religion than Jane Austen's novels. Few circles would have been less likely to give a welcome to Revivalist "enthusiasm." But her unclerical clergymen and their lay acquaintances are not indisposed to read Cowper aloud to the ladies whom they admire And no small part of the work of bringing the mind of that generation to a more humane view of things belongs to the poet. If debtors are no longer imprisoned, if India is no longer oppressed, if public schools are no longer places of barbarism and terror, if slaves are free, and animals protected from cruelty both by opinion and by law, our gratitude must not forget that Cowper pleaded for them all in what was the most popular poem of its day.

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