WILLIAM COWPER.

POET OF THE DOMESTIC AFFECTIONS.

INE of the most pathetic characters in English literature is William Cowper. A sensitive child, his mother died when he was six years of age, and he suffered brutal persecution in boardingschools. He was apprenticed to an attorney, and obtained an appointment in the House of Lords; but the terror with which the prospect of a formal examination affected him drove him into insanity. He was confined for some time, and on his release placed himself under the care of Mr. Unwin, a clergyman in Huntingdon. The genial companionship of these kind friends was a constant help and support to the sensitive spirit of Cowper. In this family, and frequently at the suggestion of Mrs. Unwin, he wrote all his principal poems, including "Table Talk," "The Progress of Error," "Truth," "Hope," and a great many others.

Another friend, Lady Austen, urged him to write in a lighter strain, and it was at her suggestion that the delightful ballad, "John Gilpin," and his most famous poem, "The Task," were written. Insanity recurred several times during his life, and he never was able to escape from its shadow. He died, in 1800, at the age of sixty-nine. He was quite successful in translations from the classics; but it was in his "Letters" that he most excelled. They show him in his most amiable light, and Southey has pronounced him "the best of English letter-writers."

ON SLAVERY.
FROM "THE TASK."

H for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war
Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart-
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax

That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colored like his own, and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed,
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys.

IMAGINARY VERSES OF ALEXANDER SELKIRK DURING HIS SOLITARY ABODE ON JUAN FERNANDEZ.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

HE writer of some of the most delicately beautiful verse in the English language, Shelley passed his short life in continual rebellion against the most commonly accepted social laws. He was a sensitive child, and went to Oxford full of abhorrence of the hateful tyranny he had witnessed in boys' schools, and which he imagined was typical of the cruelty and bigotry pervading civilized life. He was expelled from the University for publishing a tract avowing atheistic principles, and, his father refusing to receive him, he ran away with Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a retired publican, and was married to her in Scotland. After two or three years he heartlessly abandoned his wife and children, and lived the remainder of his life abroad-much of the time with Byron.

He was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia, the sail-boat in which he had embarked having been caught in a sudden squall. His body was washed ashore, and here, on the eighteenth of July, 1822, in accordance with the quarantine laws of the place, was burned.

In the thirty years of his life he had made many friends and broken many hearts. His admirers considered that he ushered in a new era of English poetry, and many of his pieces can be compared only with the work of the very greatest poets.

His longer works are, however, little read, and his fame rests upon his exquisite short poems, particularly the "Skylark," "The Cloud," "The Sensitive Plant," and "Adonais," a lament for the early death of the poet Keats.

THE SENSITIVE PLANT.

SENSITIVE plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew;
And it open'd its fan-like leaves to the
light,

And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

And the spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of love felt everywhere.
And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

The snow-drop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mix'd with fresh odor sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers, and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;