And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth. We have now made, you observe, a step further. Nature, it is true, is not yet alive, but a spirit of life is now in it, separate from it, but working in it. So near, in fact, have we got to the conception of Nature as alive, that Cowper is betrayed unconsciously into phrases which mingle God up with the universe and make it living. The lines above, which speak of the diffusion of God through all, are repeated in idea in this other phrase: There lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God.. It is This is a contradiction of his position of a God wholly distinct from the universe, but it marks the transition to the last step in the poetic idea of Nature. the conception of Nature as a living Being to whom affection was due, who could of herself awake feeling and thought in Man, whom we could love as we love our fellow-men, who lived her own life and had conscious pleasure in it—it is this conception which unconsciously in Cowper began to tremble into being. It sprang into full being in Wordsworth, and then, when Nature was conceived of as alive, its theology took a new form, or rather several forms-each modified by the personal theology or philosophy of the Poet-in the poetry of England. I shall trace that through Wordsworth and Shelley; we shall see how it influenced or did not influence the poetry of Byron and Keats; I shall mark the transitional position of Coleridge with regard to it; but before I enter upon it, I must discuss, not only how far Cowper carried the poetry of Man and how he made it theological, but also how far his theology influenced his personal poetry. That will form the subject of my next Lecture. LECTURE III. COWPER. I TRACED in my first lecture the growth of the Poetry of Man from the critical school to Cowper. In Cowper's hands, it took a much wider development. I only laid down the larger lines of its growth, omitting for the sake of clearness a number of branch lines, such as that of the new interest taken in the romantic past, which, touched by Macpherson in his "Ossian," and by Chatterton in his forgeries, was afterwards fully worked out in narrative poetry by Sir Walter Scott: such as the ballad, which chose a short narrative of human passion and related it with simplicity and intensity-or the shorter lyric, which in its treatment of a passing phase of meditative or violent passion of the heart, and in its strict limitation of itself within that phase, so as to preserve what is called lyrical unity, is strictly analogous to the hymn in its treatment of a sudden and transient phase of the life of spiritual feeling. These and others I pass by-though one sees how largely they entered the work of the poets on Manbecause theology of any kind would not be likely to intrude into them. I remain close then to the large lines I have spoken of; and my object in the first part of this lecture is, to show how largely Cowper extended the poetry of Man, and how it was influenced, and in him indeed drenched with theology. I approach the subject by asking where we find him writing, and the question has its meaning. We find him retired in the heart of a very quiet country. The slow eddying Ouse flowed close to his dwelling through its willow-haunted meadows; it accompanied his walks, and its quiet movement seems to flow through his poetry. Day after day, Yardley Wood and the park of the Throckmortons saw the silent poet-face moving amidst their trees. But little society disturbed that sequestered life; few were the men and fewer the women whom he met; he companied with sheep and birds, with his hares and his spaniel, till he grew to know them as his friends; and one would say that in such a life the poetry of Man was not likely to flourish, nor was a wide view of mankind possible. Was it probable that this lawyer's clerk, who had made a hopeless failure of his public life, should say more of human nature and strike deeper into the world of men than the brilliant Londoner, Pope, or the courtly scholar, Gray-that the voice which spoke of Man from the solitude of the country should say more than the voice which spoke of him from the crowded society of the city? In one point certainly this rural retirement spoiled the largeness of Cowper's view. He saw cities and their evils through the exaggeration of distance, and in that glare of morality in which sin is so magnified that the good which balances it is lost. His doctrinal views had also power over him and he saw the curse which rested on man and nothing else, when he looked upon the city. It was different when he turned his eyes upon the village and the country poor. Seeing clearly their evil he also saw their good, and it is with some naïveté that he imputes more than half the evil in the country to the influence of those who drift thither from the town. But whether in the country or the town, Cowper's religion led him to trace all moral guilt and folly to the world's rejection of Christ. But the point I wish to draw your attention to is, that unlike the town poet of the past to whom the dwellers in the country are nothing, we have now the country poet deeply interested in the life of towns as well as in the life around him. It is no longer classes of men which awake sympathy, nor special societies; it is no longer the passionate or the moral or the intellectual side of human nature, each alone, on which the poet dwells,-it is the whole of mankind, it is the whole of human nature. The truth is, the first swell of the great wave which put Man in the foremost place and interest, Man independent of rank and caste and convention and education, Man in his simple elements, was now flowing over Europe. Poets are quick to feel, and it reached the quiet Cowper in his hermitage, as it reached the lowland lad who, in his glory and his joy, Followed his plough along the mountain side, and for the first time, as one smells the brine before one sees the ocean, we scent in English poetry, too distinctly to be explained away, the air of those ideas of which the French Revolution was the most local and the most L |