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Hear the sweet accents of his tuneful voice,
Hear him, o'erwhelm'd with sorrow, yet rejoice;
No womanish or wailing grief has part,
No, not a moment, in his royal heart;
'Tis manly music, such as martyrs make,
Suffering with gladness for a Saviour's sake;
His soul exults, hope animates his lays,
The sense of mercy kindles into praise,
And wilds, familiar with a lion's roar,
Ring with ecstatic sounds unheard before :
'Tis love like his that can alone defeat
The foes of man, or make a desert sweet.
Religion does not censure or exclude
Unnumber'd pleasures harmlessly pursued ;
To study culture, and with artful toil
To meliorate and tame the stubborn soil;
To give dissimilar yet fruitful lands

The grain, or herb, or plant that each demands;
To cherish virtue in a humble state,

And share the joys your bounty may create; To mark the matchless workings of the power That shuts within its seed the future flower, Bid these in elegance of form excel,

In colour these, and those delight the smell, Sends Nature forth the daughter of the skies, To dance on earth and charm all human eyes; To teach the canvass innocent deceit,

Or lay the landscape on the snowy sheet, These, these are arts pursued without a crime, That leave no stain upon the wing of Time.

Me poetry (or rather notes that aim
Feebly and vainly at poetic fame)

Employs, shut out from more important views,
Fast by the banks of the slow winding Ouse;
Content if thus sequester'd I may raise
A monitor's though not a poet's praise,
And while I teach an art too little known,
To close life wisely, may not waste my own.

THE TASK.

"ADVERTISEMENT. The history of the following production is briefly this:-A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and preserving the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair-a volume."

Such is the modest account of its name and origin with which Cowper introduced this noble poem to the world. It may be necessary to remind the reader, that the allusion is to Lady Austen; and that the undertaking thus gently imposed, occupied in its completion nearly fourteen months, from June or July, 1783, to October, 1784, when the manuscripts were sent to press, though the work did not appear till the succeeding summer.

During almost a century previous to the publication of the Task, a poetical school had dominated, which may be termed the Classical, inasmuch as its principles of composition and maxims of taste were derived more from the usage of the ancients, than framed in obedience to the peculiarities and genius of the native idiom, or adapted to seek and to find its materials in the national manners and modes of thinking. The system hung a dead weight upon the fancytaste was exercised rather than genius displayed- and merit consisted more in the absence of what offended in others, than in the presence of that which charmed from its own native freshness.

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Hence, though some of the most splendid names in the annals of letters adorned our poetry, England could scarcely be said to possess a single poem descriptive of national manners and home scenes, till the publication of Cowper's great work. Nay, even in language hardly had we a poet truly British, who yielded himself up to the unrestrained flow of the national numbers, or who would not hesitate to adopt a word if it expressed his meaning, though it might not have received the stamp of poetical, that is conventional usage. We do not intend in this to magnify his powers, or overrate the debt which living poetry owes to our present subject on the contrary, English genius had long previously been but as a Goliah in fetters, playing constrained feats, and unequal to a far inferior strength in one who should first dare to cast from him the intellectual chains imposed by the practice of his predecessors. Cowper had the courage, or the good fortune, to vindicate for himself the full privileges of language and nature. At first, indeed, the classic system still enchained his admiration -his juvenile pieces are composed in that style-and in manner, at least, even his earlier volume belongs more to the preceding school than to his own; but in its best compositions we discover also successful innovation upon monotony and false refinement. We find a vigour, a freshness, an originality of thought and description, with a natural, an unstudied force of idiomatic expression, and even a colloquial familiarity of verse, which had long been banished, or never previously received into the service of the muses. The praise, then, of having knowingly and boldly struck into a path traced by his own genius through the untrodden scenery of nature, may hardly be denied to Cowper; for we can note his systematic deviations from the beaten track, and placing ourselves in his position, can descry the distant landmarks which conducted him onwards to the high places of poesy. Doubtless such was the taste of his own age, and in some respects such is still the taste of ours, that these his earlier exertions would have failed to make an impression,unsupported by the Task they would have sunk, though possessing some of the finest requisites of buoyance in themselves; and through the latter alone may his admirers fully claim for him the highest meed of genius, -the praise of invention, and the honour of being the most conspicuous founder of a new and influential school of national poetry.

This distinction is now shared with others, whose claims are

allowed. But to Cowper belongs the merit of having made the first impression on the public mind. And if to extend the power of reality over fiction, yet enlarge the empire of fancy, by opening fresh sources of natural imagery and sentiment-if to add novelty to that which is common, and interest to what is ordinary—if to discard conventional language, and animate verse with the variety, the strength, and even the familiarity of prose, constitute a literary reformation,-then does the publication of the Task mark an important and brilliant era in the later annals of English literature.

Like almost all who have laboured to bring back taste from a state of high artificial refinement to simplicity and truth, Cowper has been accused of irregularity and of coarseness. That in seeking to avoid one extreme, he may have occasionally fallen into the opposite, may be the case; but it is not true, as has been alleged, that his great work is throughout defective in methodical construction. The merely incidental origin of the Task may at first have occasioned some looseness of idea in the writer's conceptions as to its divisions and final object. The knowledge of this fact, confessed by himself on the appearance of the poem, was certainly calculated to countenance, and probably it suggested, this main objection. Now it is not easy either to apprehend the justice of the criticism on special grounds, or to admit generally the necessity of a decided plan in a poem avowedly descriptive, and consequently discursive. The very subject proposed allowed to the poet unrestricted freedom in the choice, and every variety in the mode of treating his themes. Seated in imagination beside him on the SOFA, we enter fully into all the allusions, changes, breaks, and connections of the discourse. We readily feel that the very quiet of home around us renders, by contrast, the transitions to the bustle of the world without, both natural and pleasing. Where, again, could "rural sights and rural sounds" be more appropriately the subjects of remark than amid the smiling scenes and cheerful animation of country life? Or, what more consistent than that one, fond of innocent recreation and healthful exercise, should entertain us with gardening, or carry us with him to his walks, his views, and his trees? How closely, too, and how sweetly, is the original theme connected with the "intimate delights" of domestic retirement? and we appeal to every soul of sensibility to attest the power, the charm, and the veracity of this portion of the Task. Thus even externally the regular succession of subject is beautiful. We

look, indeed, from the loop-holes of personal retreat upon the turmoil or the vices which are abroad; and it is confessed, also, that we walk forth into the scenery of local nature: but our conductor is embued with the omnipotency of geniushis touch is truth; and whatever is true to nature and to human feeling, in any one situation, has interest in all. Hence it is, that, surrounded as we are by individuality, the heart is never more intensely alive to the universal loveliness of natureall that is most affecting in the moral world, than when we are reading the pages of Cowper.

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It is this very individuality, in fact, that imparts its impressiveness and fascination to the verse. Whatever is individual to the poet, we love, because we admire his character: if the individuality be that of English life, it affects us with the proud consciousness that the same is true of ten thousand hearths, encircled by sanctity and happiness—a consciousness which makes their country the heart's home of Britons, and renders that country unparalleled in all the world. Away, then, as applied to such a work, with the prescriptions of a cold and artificial criticism. Plan! it is Nature's, the association of great principles, uniting diversity of particular details, blended and wrought into one harmonious and touching whole. These leading principles, too, are of the noblest interest, the love of God-the love of nature-and the love of man. These glorious themes pervade and animate the entire poem, while they consolidate its richness of diversified illustration. They are the circlets of precious ore which gently blend into one brilliant diadem the varied splendour of separate gems.

Again, the beauty of individual transition is one of Cowper's happiest merits. He neither paralyzes the fancy by too logical or marked distinctions, nor does he crowd his various topics upon the attention, without any connecting link by which they may arrange themselves in the memory. The intellectual gradations by which one train of thought melts into a new succession of ideas, are often, indeed, faint in their original differences, and blend so imperceptibly, as to bear us into a fresh topic before we are aware of having passed from the old one. At the same time, the judgment, on deliberation, is rarely, if ever, left unsatisfied, or incapable of tracing the progress of transition; frequently, on the contrary, a gentle and pleasing surprise is the effect of such retrospective inquiries. Description, we perceive, introduces reflection, while reflection in turn leads to description; and it gratifies us

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