strength and weakness, is visible almost at once. The very first piece, the verses written at Bath when he was only seventeen, shows already the love and imitation of Milton, the only poet he ever deliberately copied: there is the direct parody in the first few lines; and there is, in the second half of the piece, the hint of the manner seen afterwards in the weaker places of the "Task," that of a Milton come down from the heights, and not quite sure whether he has taken the tragic buskin off or not; there is the peculiar clumsiness of his later work, like a parody of Homer,-"the cobbler, leather-carving artist; " there is his own padding, to be excused in a verse-making boy, but less excusable in the author of the "Task," and there is also already his own excellent line

"Drags the dull load of disappointment on.”

Travel a very little further, only to the verses which begin "Grant me the Muse." He already knows himself to be poet, not of the "tall Parnassian cliff," but of the "still Lethæan lake:" his Muse is one of quiet places, one whose "slow pinions brush the silent shore." The lines to Richardson, again, anticipate the poet who was, like Richardson himself, always and everywhere a preacher. And the various pieces addressed to Delia, his only love poems, are the proof, in their solitariness, of his perfect sincerity, for they are addressed to his only love: and in their note, one not so much of passion as of a peculiarly intimate tenderness, are a foretaste of the lines to Mary and to his mother's picture.

"Oh! then indulge thy grief, nor fear to tell

The gentle source from whence thy sorrows flow;
Nor think it weakness when we love to feel,
Nor think it weakness what we feel to show."

Every line comes from the heart and goes to it. Cowper is nowhere more a poet than in the best of these pieces, and nowhere more himself. In the beautiful stanzas

"Bid adieu, my sad heart, bid adieu to thy peace!
Thy pleasure is past, and thy sorrows increase;
See the shadows of evening how far they extend,
And a long night is coming, that never may end;
For the sun is now set that enlivened the scene,
And an age must be past ere it rises again,"

we already hear the pensive melancholy of the 'Shrubbery,' and we get even the very measure of that later and better-known farewell

"The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade

And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade."

In another of these poems of his love we perhaps even get a first faint hint of the delusions which were afterwards to take such awful shape. But it is unnecessary to pursue these details further. The importance of the early poems lies in the proof they afford that the poetic vein in Cowper was part of the original man, and shows exactly the same colour in the young "wit" of the Temple as it did a quarter of a century later in the poetic recluse of Olney. His manner is his own from the first. Lover as he was of the Greek and Roman poets, it is absolutely uninfluenced by classical models. To Pope, still the ruling name in England, he never professed any allegiance; and though no one in that day could quite escape Pope's power, no one went so near escaping it as Cowper. Even so late as 1782, it was still an achievement, and one great enough to be itself proof of original power, to write moral satires that contain little or no trace of Pope. Cowper was a great admirer of Gray, the anti-Pope, as he has sometimes been made in our own day, and a few traces of him may be found once or twice in Cowper's work; but the ambitious and self-conscious style of Gray's odes is altogether alien to Cowper, who is always, at least in his short pieces, simple, tender, spontaneous. Probably no poet, in all the history of the art, did so little casting about for a subject. He just took what came. That is the secret of his rare sincerity; it is also, no doubt, the cause of his too frequent triviality. If he could have added something more of artistic seriousness to his spontaneity, he would have known that, though the highest poetry finds its origin in these suggestions from within that arise we know not how and seem to be a part of ourselves, yet not all such suggestions have poetic value; and many, which have, require very deliberate and conscious development before their value can be realized. But his was, all through, a talent that understood neither its limitations nor its possibilities.

Of the only other verse written by Cowper before the time of his first volume, little need be said. Hymns have rarely been literature, and Cowper's religious convictions were too definite and too narrow to allow him to handle his subject with the necessary freedom of an artist. A good many of the hymns which he contributed to the "Olney Hymns," issued by Newton in 1779, have remained in use, though till hymn-books give author's names and dates, as they all so easily could and should, most people will remain unaware that they are singing the verses of a great poet, when "Hark, my soul! it is the Lord," "O for a closer walk with God," "Jesus, where'er thy people meet," or "God moves in a mysterious way," are sung in church. But it is not their literary merit that has kept them alive. They live by the evident, almost breathing, sincerity of their every word: by their visible character of actual personal feeling and experiences. Indeed, it is curious that Cowper, by far the greatest English poet who has written hymns, never

approaches the fine poetic quality of Newman, Keble, Ellerton, or the single masterpiece of Addison. The truth is that his hymns have the strength and the weakness of a very simple nature. Only such a nature, that of the "little child" of the Gospels, can feel the love of Christ, His almost visible and sensible companionship, as Cowper does; but only a larger nature, a mind of greater breadth and culture, can utter the mystery of faith. For Cowper there is no mystery; the scheme of this world and the next, of God and man, and God's dealings with man, is quite plain: except on the side of character, he does not feel anything of the temper which said, "God is in heaven; and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few." The fine note of such hymns as "O Strength and Stay, upholding all creation," or "God of the living," where the rare quality consists as much in the consciousness of the darkness that surrounds us as in the living faith that lights it up, enough of it at least for life and hope, that is altogether beyond Cowper. At the same time, it must be said that he never falls into the opposite note, the besetting sin of the religious verse of his school. He never addresses his Master with the familiarity which shocks and pains all reverent feeling in some hymns which have been only too well known. From that, no doubt, his education saved him: it was not for nothing that he had been born in an English rectory and brought up at Westminster School. But his narrowness of creed, and indeed of mind, allows him to define on these high themes with the confident and prosaic precision of a lawyer. And even in the hymns, perhaps, it is no strictly religious subject that brings him out best as a poet; but rather his own special theme, the praise of Retirement.

There if Thy Spirit touch the soul,

And

grace her mean abode,

Oh with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!

"There like the nightingale she pours

Her solitary lays;

Nor asks a witness of her song,

Nor thirsts for human praise."

It is to be noted that most of his hymns, all written before the attack of 1773, strike a hopeful note in marked contrast to his later miserable delusions. •

One other early work there is, not known to be Cowper's till long after his death. The occasion of it was a foolish publication of a cousin of his, Martin Madan, which advocated polygamy on Scriptural grounds. The affair is of no interest now, except as an extreme instance of the follies to which an unhistorical treatment

of the Bible may lead. Cowper held literal views of inspiration which in strictness would have gone a long way towards proving his cousin's absurdities, but, as may be seen in his letter to Unwin about the text that commands the giving of the other cheek, his good sense always saved him from crossing the gulf which separates extreme views from extreme actions. In his indignation with Madan he wrote the piece called " Antithelyphthora," and it was printed anonymously in 1781. It ridicules, under the form of a more or less Spenserian allegory, the victims of the enchantress Hypothesis. Cowper is feeling his way as a satirist, and he soon found that this indirect way was not the one for him, and never returned to it. The poem is of no importance, but has been judged with absurd severity by Canon Benham in the Globe Edition. It is by no means so far away from Cowper's later satire as he supposes: what could be more exactly in that manner than the ridicule of the Berkleian philosophy, with the couplet—

"And he that splits his cranium, breaks at most

A fancied head against a fancied post?"

And there is even a passage in it which anticipates better things than the satires: where is a pleasanter autumn scene than this?

"'Twas on the noon of an autumnal day,
October hight, but mild and fair as May;
When scarlet fruits the russet hedge adorn,
And floating films envelope every thorn;
When gently, as in June, the rivers glide,

And only miss the flowers that graced their side."

The curious thing is that it reminds us, not so much of the "Task," as of the "Tales of the Hall." The manner is exactly that of Crabbe: nine readers out of ten would unhesitatingly pronounce these lines to be Crabbe, and no one else. The thing described is what was to be Cowper's subject certainly; no one deals more in these small beauties of Nature: but to give us Cowper's manner we need a certain intimacy of individual experience which is not here.

Poems by William Cowper, Esq., of the Inner Temple, appeared in 1782. The bulk of the book consists of the eight satires, "Table Talk," "The Progress of Error," "Truth," "Expostulation," "Hope," "Charity," "Conversation," and "Retirement." "Table Talk" was placed first, as less likely than its successors to repel the ordinary reader. And there was every need for the precaution. The true criticism on them all is suggested by Cowper's own jingle in the well-known letter to Newton: "I have writ Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good!" The "hopes to do good" are but too painfully conspicuous throughout. His avowed aim is to obtain "a monitor's

though not a poet's praise," and, unhappily, the one often precludes the other. In the main the satires are sermons in verse. "Table Talk" is a dialogue, but it is not easy to make out either the distinction between the parties or the subjects of their talk. As far as there is a subject, it seems to be the need of character in public men. "The Progress of Error" contains its own criticism in the couplet"The clear harangue, and cold as it is clear,

66

Falls soporific on the listless ear."

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It traces human weaknesses, from their beginning in the cult of pleasure, to their end in vanity and ruin. "Truth is a sermon on grace," and against "works." "Expostulation" argues that the English, having been highly favoured like the Jews, will, if they do not take warning in time, fall like the Jews in unique awfulness of ruin. "Hope," beginning with the assertion that the weariness and satiety felt by all are only to be healed by a hope that looks beyond this life, ends by becoming almost a denial of all hopes except those of the poet's own religious school. Charity" is the contrast between what man has made of man and what his Creator intended him to make. "Conversation" is in a lighter vein: it passes in review, humorously enough, the petty miseries we all suffer from hearing too much small talk or possessing too little. Is it pushing hypothesis too far to suggest that the lighter touch is already due to the influence of Lady Austen? It was written during the first few weeks of their intimacy, in the summer of 1781.* At any rate, I think it is clear that it is to her inspiration, destined to be so fruitful for Cowper, that "Retirement," the last and best of the satires, is due. I do not know whether it has been already pointed out, but it is noticeable that the subject of this piece is not only Cowper's, but, in a very special sense, at that moment, Lady Austen's. She was come into the country for the very purpose of retirement, and fully shared Cowper's theories on the subject. What she seems to have shared less completely was his particular religious tenets. Only a religious woman could have been a friend of Cowper: but Lady Austen's outlook upon most questions, and especially upon those of the limits of the morally lawful and unlawful, was altogether wider, saner, and more cheerful than Cowper's, more especially when Cowper was an echo of Newton. Her influence does not go far, as yet, but, if I am not mistaken, it is visibly there. The change just amounts to this: that life in the country is no longer praised because it is not life in the town; but because it is life among trees, and birds, and rivers. The negative

It is true that Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh in 1786 (Jan. 16) that he had published his first volume before Lady Austen came. But his memory deceived him. The letters to Newton and Unwin, written July 22 and July 29, 1781, show that he was beginning "Conversation" just when the friendship with Lady Austen was beginning.