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least the real utterances of a real man. He 'spake as he was moved.' 'I have inexpressible objections,' he once wrote, 'to all false pretences and affected exhibitions of what I do not feel.' When Mr. Newton, dubious as to the innocence of merely literary employments, would have had him substitute for them others of a more decidedly religious cast, he replied, 'Ask possibilities, and they shall be performed; but ask not hymns from a man suffering by despair, as I do. I dare not, either in prose or verse, allow myself to express a frame of mind which I am conscious does not belong to me.'

And this reality of the man invests his writings at once with a moral dignity, and with literary excellence. Everything that he has written bears the stamp of earnest purpose, vehement sincerity, and solemn energy. He was the true 'Vates'—one of those poets of whom he speaks in 'The Task,'

'Whose fire was kindled at the prophet's lamp.' Like the Prophets of old, he is speaking for Another, whose Divine ideas have been so powerfully breathed into his soul, as to have taken complete possession of his being; so that his very self is impregnated with the germinating thoughts of Another. This was the view which Cowper took of the work that had been given him to do. Under a consciousness that he was commissioned for that work, he wrote to his friend Unwin, on the appearance of his first volume of poems:-'I know there is in the book that wisdom which cometh from above, because it was from above that I received it. May my readers receive it too! For whether they drink it out of the cistern, or whether it falls upon them immediately from the clouds, as it did on me, it is all one. It is the water of life, which whosoever drinketh shall thirst no more.' Like the Prophets of old too, he identified himself with the cause of God, 'his Master's interests and his own combined.' He was jealous for His honour, demanded for Him His rights, was earnest to press on all mankind His claims upon the service of their hearts. His spirit was stirred within him as he saw men set at

nought the righteous law of God. 'Facit indignatio versus was the cry of the heathen Juvenal of old; and the same sentiment swayed the heart of the Christian Cowper. He 'could not but speak.' His 'heart was hot within him; and while he mused the fire kindled, till at the last he spake with his tongue.' He was a very John Baptist in' the manly fearlessness with which he rebuked vice in high places; while with ruthless hand he tore off

'The mask from faces never seen before,

And stripped impostors in the noonday sun.'

Again, it is this reality of the man which accounts for his thoughts and expressions standing out, as they do, in clear and bold relief. We have seen, that the simplicity and purity of the general design which Cowper proposed to himself contributed to the transparency of his style in writing. Regardless of self, he sought to do good to his readers; and if he would do them good he must make them understand him. But the thought must be clear, before the language in which it is conveyed can become intelligible. If a man would teach others, he must first have been a learner himself. Now Cowper's thoughts were always clear and distinct. They were not, it may be, very profound; and possibly in some instances they were defective, or erroneous. But such as they were, he had made them his own, and he believed in them. He understood them himself, before he offered them to the public. He had not been content with merely looking at them: he had looked into them, and looked through them, and looked round them. He had been careful to cultivate an intimate acquaintance with them on his own part, before venturing to introduce them to others. It is not an impression that he seeks to convey; but the impression, for the stamping of which he has previously designed and elaborated the die. And the result is, that what he says is always distinct and definite, often strong and incisive. 'Remember that in writing, perspicuity is always more than half the battle. The want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as

no meaning; because nobody will take the pains to poke for it.' This was the characteristic advice which a young aspirant to poetic fame received from Cowper. Many of us will think that he has here stated the matter too broadly; inasmuch as a fairly intelligent reader derives much of his pleasure and profit from following out the hints, and pausing to weigh the suggestions of his author. At all events, the principle thus laid down was that which guided Cowper in his own practice. His meaning is never far to seek. Whatever, therefore, his critics may have to say of his 'daring commonplaces,' they have little scope for the display of their ingenuity in clearing obscurities, or commenting on ambiguities in language or conception. And if we admit that the Poet's thoughts were at times so simple as to sound commonplace, we must allow also that a commonplace man would, for this very reaason, not have ventured to produce them. It is not an easy task to give such expression to sentiments trite and obvious in themselves, as shall invest them with individuality and propriety, in the form in which they are introduced. Horace has taught us this:

'Difficile est proprie communia dicere'—

and this is a difficulty which our Poet has met and overcome. In his verse are to be found many familiar thoughts, which his readers welcome as old and cherished friends; and it is with a kind of grateful satisfaction that they recognise therein

'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.'

Once more, this reality of the man begets the fascinating realism of the artist, in his portraiture of Nature. Though Nature was ever the 'great inspirer of his strains,' yet he does not pretend to take

'Nature in all the various shapes she wears

for his theme; for the simple reason that he has not seen her in them all. He declines to tell us all about that of which he knows nothing himself. He has his good-humoured laugh at the expense of the man, whose 'bonny Caledonian' song is

'All birks and braes, though he was never there.' He himself had never seen the Mediterranean Sea; and the good man, in his simplicity, regarded this as an excellent reason why he should not make it the subject of a poem. He had passed all his life in flat districts, where he had no chance of seeing anything that deserved the name of a hill; so he refrained from drawing on his imagination to depict mountainous scenery. But he had seen an eminence'; and he takes care that we also shall see it, and enjoy the prospect from it, with his eyes. 'My descriptions,' he wrote to Unwin, 'are all from Nature; not one of them second-handed.' This is the secret of the strikingly pictorial effect of Cowper's poetry. The reader needs no Ordnance map or Gazetteer, who has before him in 'The Task' the illustrated handbook of Olney and its adjacent villages. He feels as if he were moving through a picture-gallery, hung with a succession of landscapes and cabinet pieces. Here is 'The Peasant's Nest'-not reproduced with the mechanical and soulless exactitude of the photogram, but painted with the far more truthful, because more artistic hand of the loving student of Nature in her external forms of beauty. It is a Gainsborough. There is the Gipsies' encampment, with the 'kettle slung between two poles upon a stick transverse,' and the tawny race dancing in their 'fluttering rags' to the 'music of a bladder and a bag.' It is a Wilkie. Now we come upon a Hogarth :-the paralytic old card-playing dowager, borrowing a friend's hand to deal and shuffle for her, while she nods her crazy head at the 'corpse' who has been shaken down by his bearers into the seat, from which he has no power to stir. And now it is the Pre-Raffaelite school that is represented; and we marvel at the minute labour which has been expended on the marbles of the Schoolboy, the knitting-needles plied by Mrs. Unwin's busy fingers, or even (as the painters of this school will sometimes choose what the uninitiated are apt to deem 'subjects too mean and low for Art') the cucumber-frames in the garden. There are scores of such pictures to be seen in the Cowper gallery, and each is perfect in its kind: each

leaves one distinct and vivid impression on the mind of the beholder.

Nor does Cowper trouble us with the unreal Damons and Lesbias with which his predecessors and contemporaries were wont to stuff their rhymes. As West was the first painter who ventured on the alarming innovation of portraying soldiers in their regimentals, and has rendered Wolfe deathless by so doing; so Cowper has swept away the whole tribe of disconsolate nymphs and puling swains, and has given us men and women of flesh and blood in their stead. We cannot succeed in getting up a sentiment of sympathy with the artificial woes of the Delias and Corydons; but our hearts throb, and our eyes grow moist, as we see Crazy Kate 'roaming the dreary waste.'

A man of Cowper's stamp could not be otherwise than original. His style must needs be the outcome of his nature, and the revelation of his personal idiosyncrasy. He could not run in the ruts worn for him by his predecessors. There was in him that manly independence of character, which made it simply impossible that he should become a copyist of others. It is indeed in some respects a matter for regret, that he possessed so slight an acquaintance with the thoughts and style of our best English writers. He read little, and what he did read was not in the highest class of literature. The 'Monthly Review' and 'Gentleman's Magazine,' with a few books of voyages and biography, were sufficient to satisfy the cravings of his literary appetite. So far was he from bewailing his want of familiarity with the works of previous poets, or regarding this as any disqualification in himself, that there is something almost defiant in the tone in which he vaunted his entire ignorance of them. 'I reckon it' he wrote to Unwin in 1781, 'among my principal advantages as a composer of verses, that I have read no English poet these thirteen years, and but one these twenty years. Imitation, even of the best models, is my aversion; it is servile and mechanical-a trick that has enabled many to usurp the name of an author, who could not have written at all, had they not written upon the pattern of somebody

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