These are good things which we would not miss, but there are more and better in the second volume. But for the "Task" Cowper would hardly have ranked higher than such poets as Lovelace, or Vaughan, or Prior, remembered only by half a dozen, or even fewer, short pieces. As it is, he is the poet of the "Task," as Milton is the poet of "Paradise Lost," or Dante of the " Commedia,” not as Prior is of "Solomon," Cowley of the "Davideis,” or even Wordsworth of the "Excursion." It is his greatest achievement, not merely the achievement he meant to be his greatest. Perhaps no long poem since the Georgics had handled the common sights and sounds, the common feelings and doings of rural life with such sympathy and power as Cowper shows in the "Task.”

Every one knows its curious origin. Lady Austen urged him to attempt a poem in blank verse, and, on his asking for a subject, gave him the sofa on which we may imagine she was at that moment lying. The first book was accordingly the "Sofa," and the whole the "Task." Lady Austen's answer shows that the invaluable influence she had upon Cowper came from the heart or the temperament, not from the head. No one who understood anything about the art of poetry could have suggested such a subject. And Cowper evidently accepted it in the only spirit in which it could be accepted, for he begins what was to be one of the most serious of English poems in the style of mock-heroic burlesque. But the important thing was to set him going and make him understand that he was not to come back again until he had accomplished something considerable; and all the credit of that belongs to Lady Austen. The rest he could be trusted to do for himself, and it is pretty to see how he does it. He has given but just a hundred lines to praise of the sofa and parody of Milton, when he makes for himself an excellent way of escape. ""Tis the gouty man who more than any one knows the delights of the sofa, but such cruel chance of realizing them I may hope never to experience

bounds

"For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk
O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink,
E' er since a truant boy I passed my
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still remember, nor without regret
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,
Still hungering, penniless, and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss
The bramble black as jet, or sloes austere ;

Hard fare, but such as boyish appetite
Disdains not, nor the palate, undepraved
By culinary arts, unsavoury deems.
No Sofa then awaited my return,
Nor Sofa then I needed. Youth repairs
His wasted spirits quickly, by long toil
Incurring short fatigue; and though our years,
As life declines, speed rapidly away,
And not a year but pilfers as he goes

Some youthful grace that age would gladly keep,
A tooth or auburn lock, and by degrees

Their length and colour from the locks they spare,
The elastic spring of an unwearied foot
That mounts the stile with ease, or leaps the fence,
That play of lungs, inhaling and again
Respiring freely the fresh air, that makes
Swift pace or steep ascent no toil to me,
Mine have not pilfered yet; nor yet impaired
My relish of fair prospect: scenes that soothed
Or charmed me young, no longer young I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still.
And witness, dear companion of my walks,
Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
Fast locked in mine, with pleasure such as love,
Confirmed by long experience of thy worth
And well-tried virtues, could alone inspire,-
Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.
Thou knowest my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace

Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne

The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,

And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.

Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned
The distant plough slow-moving, and, beside

His labouring team, that swerved not from the track,

The sturdy swain diminished to a boy!

Here Ouse, slow-winding through a level pain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast-rooted in his bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond and overthwart the stream

That as with molten glass inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds,
Displaying on its varied side the grace

Of hedgerow beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear;

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote.
Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years:
Praise justly due to those that I describe."

I have quoted this long passage in full because it shows with what triumphant ease Cowper makes the escape I spoke of, and because, though there are finer passages in the poem, this perhaps more than any gives the "Task" in little; as well as because the world is so strangely constituted that there are people who will read introductions to poems, but will not read the poems themselves. More I dare not give here, but if such readers will be persuaded to turn to the text, they will see that I did not desist because what followed would have done less honour to Cowper. Will not every one feel at once that the simpler sort of natural beauty has rarely been more admirably touched? Here is, at last, the real and full Cowper, and he preaches all the better for forgetting to preach. Nothing quite like these descriptive passages existed before in our own, or, so far as I know, in any other language. They are, as Cowper claims, absolutely sincere; he has himself, with his own eye, seen everything he describes: it is a great deal more than other men see; and he has found a great deal more in it. And not only his observation but his feelings are entirely his own; the whole is what the French call vécu : the personal note is everywhere, though linked, as it must be in all art. that is to count, with the note of the universal. The feeling to which the poet gives utterance is his own, but not all or only his own: it is representative as well as personal; he speaks not as an isolated individual, but as the spokesman of the human race. Of its feeling, only, of course, not of its thought: no one must look to Cowper for anything like profound thought; he is too far away from all intellectual influences for that, too content behind the narrow walls of his self-chosen cloister. His function is the interpretation of some of our best and purest feelings; as we read him we are conscious that we, too, have experienced such feelings as his, though less in degree and of less fine quality; he expresses for us what we cannot express for ourselves: that is his first work; and the second is to lead us on and up to new and higher emotions of the same order, of which his poetry brings us our first revelation. Many poets have failed in the second task because they have ignored or disdained

the first. In Cowper we begin with the familiar, with what belongs to us all, and are carried, almost without knowing it, into the world that was his only, and not ours,-the poetic world of his own creation and consecration.

All this, or at least the germ of it, is in the passage just quoted. And it is the leading feature of the whole poem. Discursive as it is, we are never very long away from these simple scenes and simple emotions. The first book, which, with the fourth and sixth, contains Cowper's best work, proceeds from the passage already quoted to go through a minute description of his favourite walks at Weston, almost every line of which may be followed on the spot to-day. It is then varied by the beautiful little story of poor Kate; and by the passage about the gipsies, which shows that their poetic day had not yet come. Cowper's blank verse is never finer than in the concluding lines, which set off with his favourite text, "God made the country, and man made the town." In spite of this epigrammatic opening, it is a pupil of Milton who has written the rest: no empty imitator, but such a scholar as the master himselt would have gladly come back to hear.

"Our groves were planted to console at noon

The pensive wanderer in their shades. At eve
The moonbeam, sliding softly in between
The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish,
Birds warbling all the music. We can spare
The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse
Our softer satellite. Your songs confound
Our more harmonious notes: the thrush departs
Scared, and the offended nightingale is mute.”

Is it fanciful to hear, in that emphatic and solitary "scared,' the sudden whirr of flight of the interrupted thrush? It is more like Tennyson than Cowper to plan such an effect; but, as Tennyson knew, there is often more in a poet's lines than he is himself quite aware of.

The second book is immeasurably inferior to the first. It is for the most part a sermon full of the poet's

"Hot displeasure against foolish men
That live an atheist life;"

and, for the rest, it is a satire on clerical coxcombs and idle college
dons. Cowper is, unhappily, in the stage of thought, so solemnly
rebuked by Christ Himself, which believes that earthquakes and
volcanoes are sent for the special punishment of the wicked; and
there is no worse example than this book, the "Timepiece
as he
significantly named it, of the positive and confidently abusive

narrowness which is the greatest stumbling-block in the way of his popularity to-day. It hardly contains a trace of Cowper the poet, except the fine lines-

"There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know;"

and the splendid outburst of patriotism which culminates in the famous

"Praise enough

To fill the ambition of a private man,

That Chatham's language was his mother tongue,
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own."

For the rest, satire and sermon are alike ruined by their scolding Society had its faults, no doubt, then as now, but such language as

tone.

So

"'Tis a fearful spectacle to see many maniacs dancing in their chains,"

hardly strikes one as the comment either of charity or of sanity on its doings.

The theme of the third book, the "Garden," is the innocent happiness and various occupations of the man

"whom the world

Calls idle, and who justly in return

Esteems that busy world an idler too."

In the main, it is a Georgic on gardening, with an interest which Virgil has not because it is the story of what the poet has himself learnt and done, but yet incapable of winning and moving us, as Virgil moves us, because it is often as full of dull details as the Georgics, and Cowper's rules for raising cucumbers are unrelieved by the verbal felicities which never quite fail Virgil, even when he is pruning vines or breeding stock. But the book contains at least two passages no reader will forget: the earnest plea for kindness to animals, culminating in the story of the favourite on whose grave he will write

"I knew at least one hare who had a friend;

and the touching account of his own case—

"I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since;

and Who found him, drew the darts forth, and bade him live.

The next book, the "Winter Evening," is the best and most