he moved to Weston Underwood, after a residence of nineteen years at Olney. Here he applied himself to the translation of Homer, his only considerable work after the Task. It was published in 1791. It is in blank verse, and has at least the merit of being far more faithful than that of Pope; but it is tame and dull, without any of the fire and rapidity of the original, and the metre in Cowper's hands is wearisome and monotonous. We cannot help regretting the five years' labour which it cost him.

In 1787 he was again attacked by fits of depression, and in 1793 these turned to confirmed insanity, from which he never again recovered. He fell into the hands of a religious charlatan, a schoolmaster of the name of Teedon, who played upon his morbid imagination, and pretended to interpret supernatural voices which he thought he heard. To add to his misfortunes, Mrs Unwin was seized with paralysis in 1791, and though she partially recovered, she was but a sad wreck of her former self, requiring to be nursed by him whom she had so often nursed. In 1796 this faithful friend of nearly thirty years was taken from him. He himself lingered for four years more, attended by devoted friends, and enjoying short and rare lucid intervals; but it was but a living death, and death itself came as a welcome release from a life out of which all joy had long gone.

It was in 1799, the year before his death, that Cowper wrote his last original poem, the most powerful of all his minor works, and the saddest lyric ever penned-the

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Castaway." He had been reading in Anson's voyages the account of a sailor who had been washed overboard, and perished after an hour's struggle with the waves, in

sight of the crew who were unable to help or rescue him. The whole poem, except the last stanza, is a description of the agonies of the drowning man, but we are conscious all along it is himself that Cowper is describing: he is the "destined wretch," the hopeless, helpless, friendless castaway.

INTRODUCTION.

"OWPER'S death, we have seen, fell in 1800, and he is

Cow

not only in time but in genius the forerunner of the present century of English poetry. But in order to estimate aright his position among poets, it is necessary to take a short survey of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. During the half century before Cowper, Pope had reigned supreme; his fame was European, and Voltaire had pronounced him "the best poet of England, and perhaps of the world." Nor was this triumph wholly unmerited. Pope's poetry is the perfection of clearness and correctness according to a conventional standard. He is far the wittiest and most epigrammatic of English poets. But he moves within very narrow limits. His versification is monotonous, his constant antithesis palls on us, and his very correctness tires. He is par excellence the poet of the town, as Cowper is of the country. In the intrigues of court and the ball-room, the follies and affectations of fashion, he is perfect; but when he attempts to describe nature he borrows his images from Virgil, and never carries us farther away from town than his trim suburban villa at Twickenham.

Against the conventional school of Pope a slow but sure reaction set in. Goldsmith, Gray, and Collins, each in different ways, by wider human sympathies, more varied melodies, and closer observation of nature, attempted a

return to naturalness. But of all his predecessors, Cowper is most indebted to Thomson. Thomson is often turgid, often vague and indistinct, but he had a true love for nature and a true eye for natural beauties. Cowper himself tells us that he thought Thomson's descriptions admirable, “but," he adds, "it has always seemed to me that there was something of affectation in them, and that his numbers are sometimes not well harmonised." 1

But to Cowper was reserved the supreme merit of a complete return to nature. When he first appeared there was hardly a poet of mark living. Gray was dead, Mason had retired, Crabbe was writing nothing, and his friend and patron Hayley (who now-a-days has read a line of Hayley?) was the favourite poet of the day. One example will suffice to show the low level which popular taste in poetry had reached. Shadwell the Poet Laureate, immediately before Cowper's day, boasted that he had made Timon of Athens into a play. Nahum Tate, his succes ́sor, whose memory has survived through his execrable version of the Psalms, adapted Coriolanus and King Lear.

Cowper himself was better in practice than in theory. He was, it is true, an admirer of Milton, whose influence we trace occasionally in his rhythm and constantly in his phraseology; but though he mentions Shakspeare more than once, there is but little in his poems or letters to show that he appreciated him. Of recent poets his favourite was Philips, a respectable writer, but wholly wanting in the higher gifts of poetry, melody, and imagination. Prior he also admired. He thought "Solomon" his best poem. To us it seems a second-rate rhetorical sermon on the Preacher's text, "Vanitas Vanitatum," with as

1 Letter to Mrs King, June 19, 1788.

much true religious feeling as one of Sterne's. But, fortunately for us, though Cowper admired these poetasters, he did not imitate them. In this sense of the word he was one of the most original of English poets. Though we cannot literally apply to him Swift's boast, that he

"To steal a hint was never known,

But what he writ was all his own,"

for he is specially fond of a classical turn, and delights almost as much as Milton in Scripture names and Scripture phraseology, yet in the spirit they are equally true of him—the conception and execution of his poems are "all his own."

This, then, is Cowper's distinctive merit, which makes his name a landmark in the history of English literature: he brought back poetry from conventionalism to nature, from the town to the country. Before him it had been the addressed itself to the culti

organ of a literary clique, and vated few; he made it the expression of the common feelings of humanity, and appealed to the sympathies of the many.

It remains for us to notice very briefly in detail his special characteristics. And, first of all, we may put his simplicity and straightforwardness. To say that a poem is obscure is not to condemn it off-hand. Obscurity may arise from confusion of thought or over subtlety, or from pure carelessness of expression, or, on the other hand, it may be the result of profundity of thought, or of the subject being far removed from ordinary thought and feeling Virgil, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, are all, in parts at least, obscure.2 But obscurity, though sometimes un

2 Let me suggest as an exercise to trace the different causes of the obscurity of these poets.