revived the memory of Thomson, so in the truth and vivacity of his Flemish painting, he anticipated the sterner pencil of Crabbe.

It has long been a favourite paradox of criticism, and has been advanced in a journal of distinguished reputation for taste and erudition, that Cowper began to be a poet at fifty years old. It has been already shown that literary ambition always formed a leading feature of his character; and that he had, in a certain sense, educated himself for authorship. Speaking of political songs, in a letter to Mr. Newton, he says, "Some written by Rowe, and I think, by Congreve, and many by other wits of the day, were proposed to my admiration. Being grown up, I became desirous of imitating such bright examples; and while I lived in the Temple, produced several half-penny ballads, two or three of which had the honour to be popular." He is also known to have kept up a rhyming correspondence with his brother, which perished, he told Lady Hesketh, "in the wreck of a thousand other things, when he left the Temple." But though we had heard nothing of his previous studies, the Task alone would have established the early cultivation of his poetical powers. The plan was constructed with admirable skill; the versification formed upon principles which combined harmony with variety, and flexibility with strength; and the diction was worthy of the writer whose letters Fox considered the finest specimens of epistolary composition in the language. Such continued excellence has never been obtained by mere felicity of execution. In his former publication, through eagerness to avoid the notes of Pope, which every warbler, he said, had by heart, he deviated into a system of versification essentially rugged, without either the music of Pope, or the majestic stateliness of

Dryden. In the Task he presented a model of blank verse, at once familiar and elegant; sometimes flowing, as Akenside; sometimes swelling, as Milton; sometimes epigramatic, as Young. Uncommon diligence was devoted to the work before it assumed this aspect of beauty and grace. “I do not mean," he wrote to Mr. Newton, after its completion, "to write blank verse again. Not having the music of rhymes, it requires so close an attention to the pause and the cadence, and such a peculiar mode of expression, as renders it, to me at least, the most difficult species of poetry that I have ever meddled with."

Of that hardihood of criticism which has denied to Cowper the faculty of invention, nothing need be said. It has been objected to his poetical claims that he has created no interesting story; woven no new chain of incidents; constructed no original machinery. If the assertion were just, which it is not, the Task would still be a great poem. He neither amazes us with the splendour of angelic ministry, nor amuses us with the charms of Fairy-land, nor transports us among the regions of Sylphs and Gnomes. He has, on the contrary, employed an agency more lasting and more humanly delightful than either. He has animated the social affections, and given the world a poem inspired only by Religion and Home. The feelings of the heart are his mythology; the emotions of the mind his machinery. But when he invokes the Genii of the Imagination they obey the summons.

It may suffice to remind the reader of the magnificent sketch of a winter sunrise, in the fifth book of the Task:

'Tis morning, and the sun with ruddy orb
Ascending fires the horizon; while the clouds
That crowd away before the driving wind,
More ardent, as the disk emerges more,
Resemble most some city in a blaze
Seen through the leafless wood.

Of the pathetic apostrophe to Omai, and, above all, of the description of the Ice Palace of the Empress Catherine, which, for beauty and novelty of fancy, for charm of expression, and moral aptness and grace of application, may be pronounced equal to any passage preserved among the treasures of verse:

No forest fell

When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores
To enrich thy walls: but thou didst hew the floods,

And make thy marble of the glassy wave.

In such a palace Aristaus found
Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale
Of his lost bees to her maternal ear.
In such a palace, poetry might place

The Armoury of Winter, where his troops,
The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,
Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,
And snow that often blinds the traveller's course,
And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose.

No sound of hammer or of saw was there.
Ice upon ice, the well-adjusted parts

Were soon conjoined, nor other cement asked

Than water interfused to make them one.

Lamps gracefully disposed, and of all hues,
Illumined every side. A watery light

Gleamed through the clear transparency, that seemed
Another moon new risen, or meteor fallen

From heaven to earth, of lambent flame serene.

So stood the brittle prodigy, though smooth
And slippery the materials, yet frost-bound
Firm as a rock. Nor wanted aught within
That royal residence might well befit,

For grandeur or for use. Long wavy wreathes
Of flowers, that feared no enemy but warmth,
Blushed on the panels. Mirror needed none
Where all was vitreous, but in order due
Convivial table, and commodious seat

(What seemed, at least, commodious seat) were there,

Sofa, and couch, and high-built throne august;
The same lubricity was found in all,

And all was moist to the warm touch, a scene
Of evanescent glory, once a stream,
And soon to slide into a stream again.
Alas! 'twas but a mortifying stroke
Of undesigned severity, that glanced
(Made by a monarch) on her own estate,
On human grandeur, and the courts of kings.
'Twas transient in its nature, as in show
'Twas durable. As worthless as it seemed

Intrinsically precious; to the foot

Treacherous and false, it smiled and it was cold.

Cowper has been justly called the Poet of the Affections; and he claims with equal emphasis to be regarded as the Poet of Christianity. Religion is not so much the subject, as the embellisher and seasoner of his poetry. 66 What

Were I to write as many Voltaire, not one of them If the world like it not,

there is of a religious cast," he wrote to Mr. Unwin, in reference to the Task, "I have thrown towards the end of it, for two reasons; first, that I might not revolt the reader at his entrance; and secondly, that my best impressions might be made last. poems as Lope de Vega, or would be without this tincture. so much the worse for them. I make all the concessions I can that I may please them, but I will not please them at the expense of conscience." His verses may be viewed as a series of parables framed to inculcate some admirable moral, some point of duty, or some Christian consolation. Nor is it the least curious among the many anomalies of his character, that while he was living in hourly contemplation, to borrow his own metaphor, of the torrent of God's Judgment, and beneath the glare of his Anger,— he would nevertheless deliver to the world a message

full of the meekness of wisdom, and breathing all the tenderness of the Gospel of Salvation.

In becoming the poet of Christianity, Cowper addressed himself especially to the common business of life. He preached to us in our amusements and occupations. Milton, whose imagination was irradiated with all the splendours of prophecy, and all the beauty of the elder literature, often describes the rites of the true worship with a Grecian ceremonial glittering in the distance; Young frequently dazzles our eyes with the blaze of fashion, or the allurements of ambition; but the poetry of Cowper is uniformly reflective, sober, and harmonious. The inspiration which Milton found in the Old Testament, he finds in the New,-and instead of the terrible threatenings of Isaiah, or the dark sayings of Ezekiel, he warns and consoles us from the lips of our Saviour, and builds up our lives from the teaching of His Apostles.