Influence of

It is still more memorable because it recalls the debt which English letters owe to the religious the religious revival, whether Evangelical or Methodist, revival. of the eighteenth century. As to the ultimate effects of that revival on the general life of the country, there have been the inevitable differences of opinion. But in literature, and especially in poetry, it would seem to have worked almost wholly for the good. It disimprisoned a whole world.

of thought and feeling which had been fast chained j beneath the hide-bound formalism of the preceding era, and for want of which the land was perishing of inanition. The poetic revival began to make itself felt within a few years after the Wesleys' life-long mission was inaugurated. And, all things considered, it is difficult to resist the conclusion, not indeed that the religious movement was the cause of the literary movement, but that both sprang in the first instance from a common source; and that, as years went on, the revival in literature was immeasurably quickened by finding an atmosphere charged with emotion and sympathy ready to receive it. In Cowper's case, at any rate, the direct connection of cause and effect can hardly be gainsaid. And nothing could more clearly mark the gulf which separates him from Pope.

Three years later than Table Talk, was published the 'work upon which Cowper's fame traditionally rests. Shortly before the issue of his first venture The Task. he had become acquainted with a butterfly enthusiast, Lady Austen; and in the honeymoon of their friendship she, being "fond of blank verse,"

had commissioned her hero of the hour to write a

poem in that metre. The unpromising subject she selected was the Sofa. This was the origin of The Task.

Judiciously treating the Sofa merely as a springboard, Cowper at once plunges into themes of his own choosing. The only part that the Sofa really plays in the poem is somewhat unfortunate. The grotesqueness of his official theme leads Cowper at times to infuse a flavour of the mock heroic, almost of the burlesque, which sorts ill with the solid qualities of the dish he sets before us. Those qualities, alike for the good and the less good, are much the same as those of the previous volume. The language is as pure; the verse, more difficult as it is to manage, is as harmonious; the religious faith and the love of external nature are expressed with still greater eloquence. The style, no doubt, is deliberately staid; but when the poet is truly stirred, a deeper note comes into his voice, and then his blank verse rises to a higher flight than any which had been written since Milton.

As for the substance of the poem, the two main themes are nature and God; and in Cowper's mind Cowper's atti- they are inseparably connected. Indeed tude to nature. the oft-quoted line, "God made the country and man made the town," is the first direct avowal of a feeling which was to inspire much of what is best, not only in his own poetry, but in that of the succeeding generation. Cowper, however, was not the man to stop short with an

abstract idea, however pregnant. And The Task abounds, far more than the preceding volume, with detailed observation of nature. Much of this, no doubt, is merely observation. It lacks the imaginative touch, without which observation is of no avail. There is too much of the market-gardener, too much of the retired gentleman with a taste for horticulture, about many of his descriptions. The Hypericum and the Mezereon, the vegetable marrow and the pumpkin, are hardly likely to stir the same enthusiasm in the reader that they did in Cowper. But such passages

as

"beneath (the trees)

The chequered earth seems restless as a flood
Brushed by the wind; "1

such pictures as that of the winter morning or the noon in spring, or the changing aspects of the meadows of the Ouse, are conceived in a very different vein; and they show Cowper at his best. It is true that the landscape in which he most delights is a sober landscape, a landscape which in itself has none of the charm that belongs to the lakes and hills of Words

It is significant that these lines are quoted by William Gilpin (Forest Scenery, I. § iii.) This writer, whose earlier work was known in MS. to Gray, played a considerable part in preparing the way for the romantic love of nature and the picturesque. He has something of Ruskin's delicate observation, particularly as to subtle effects of light and shade. But he is too much under the tyranny of "the picturesque," and his style aims at more than it is able to achieve. His best-known works are Observations on the River Wye and S. Wales (1782), which seems to have hovered in the memory of Wordsworth (Tintern), Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (1786), and Forest Scenery (1791).

worth, the mountain and sea of Byron, or the gorgeous transformations of the world of sense into a world of spirit which are the secret of Shelley. But it is the landscape which Cowper had made his own, and his love of it enabled him to render its quiet beauty with surpassing power and charm. It is a landscape akin to that of Collins' Evening; but bating that exception, if it be an exception, and certain faint anticipations in other writers, The Task is probably the earliest poem in our language to reproduce to the imagination the effect left by a given locality, a particular type of scenery, upon the eye. Other poets had individualised from nature as a whole. They had taken a particular season, a particular hour of the day, and striven to paint either its significant details or its general effect. But none had given to this vision a local habitation. This was what Cowper attempted, and this was what he achieved, thus doing for English poetry and the English midlands what some few years earlier Rousseau had done for French prose and the lakes and copses and lower mountain-slopes of Western Switzerland and Savoy.

To Cowper, however, nature does not only mean trees and flowers; it does not only mean river and upland, hill and valley, tilth and pasture. It is peopled with bird and beast: the nightingale, the stockdove and the kite, the redbreast and the bullfinch, the half-wild creatures which yet have been the immemorial friends of man, the fawn, the squirrel, and the hare. Here again he strikes a new note in English poetry. Earlier poets may have described

them, or some of them, from without. To Cowper they are companions and friends. Compare the poem on Beau the Spaniel with the stirring description of Theseus' hounds in Shakespeare. In the latter the dog is a splendid animal, a thing useful to man in the service of the chase, an animated implement and nothing more. In the former he is a being who can anticipate his master's wishes, who can live with man as a comrade, who can love and be loved. Or compare the lines on A Retired Cat with Gray's sparkling epitaph on A Cat drowned in a Vase of Goldfish. Both poems are full of humour. But Gray treats his cat throughout with a lofty patronage, which is poles asunder from the human kindliness, the wistful fellow-feeling of Cowper. The same sense of brotherhood, a sense touched here into pathos, prompts his Epitaph on a Hare. The best and most characteristic work of Cowper in this vein is to be found in the shorter poems just referred to. But there are many instances of it, though doubtless less striking, in The Task. In all alike Cowper touches, and touches for the first time, a chord which has often since been heard in our poetry, above all in Burns and Scott, in Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.

His humour

and Letters.

Humorous though he was, the humour of Cowper is not seen to such advantage when he turns to man. Here he had been anticipated by Goldsmith and, in the field of poetry at any rate, he is outstripped. It may be that he took his mission as religious and social reformer too seriously 1 Or the picture of the hare in Venus and Adonis.