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Or to the distant eye displays,
Weakly green, its budding sprays.
The swallow, for a moment seen,
Skims in haste the village green;
From the gray moor, on feeble wing,
The screaming plovers idly spring;
The butterfly, gay-painted, soon
Explores awhile the tepid noon;
And fondly trusts its tender dyes
To fickle suns and flattering skies.

Fraught with a transient frozen shower,
If a cloud should haply lower,
Sailing o'er the landscape dark,
Mute on a sudden is the lark:
But, when gleams the sun again
O'er the pearl-besprinkled plain,
And from behind his watery veil
Looks through the thin descending hail,
She mounts, and lessening to the sight,
Salutes the blithe return of light,
And high her tuneful track pursues
Mid the dim rainbow's scatter'd hues.
Beneath a willow long forsook,

The fisher seeks his 'custom'd nook,
Aud bursting through the crackling sedge,
That crowns the current's cavern'd edge,
Startles from the bordering wood
The bashful wild-duck's early brood.
His free-born vigour yet unbroke,
By lordly man's usurping yoke,
The bounding colt forgets to play,
Basking beneath the noon-tide ray,

And stretch'd among the daises pied
Of a green dingle's sloping side:

While far beneath, where Nature spreads
Her boundless length of level meads,
In loose luxuriance taught to stray,
A thousand tumbling rills inlay
With silver veins the dale, or pass
Redundant through the sparkling grass.

Yet, in these presages rude,
'Midst her pensive solitude,
Fancy, with prophetic glance,
Sees the teeming months advance :
The field, the forest, green and gay,
The dappled slope, the tedded hay;
Sees the reddening orchard blow,
The harvest wave, the vintage flow;
Sees June unfold his glossy robe
Of thousand hues o'er all the globe;
Sees Ceres grasp her crown of corn,
And Plenty load her ample horn

COWPER.

1731-1800.

PRINCIPAL WORKS:-A volume of poems, 1782, comprising the pieces entitled Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Tirocinium or a Review of Schools, Truth, Hope, Conversation.-The Task, 1785, immediately received with extraordinary favour. Compared with by far the greater part of the so-called poetry of the day, it was the language of nature and truth.-Translation of the Iliad, 1791, and an only partially accomplished edition of Milton.-The Castaway, composed not long before his death. The reputation of Cowper rests mainly upon The Task, the most considerable as well as most valuable of his productions. It was the second great poem inspired by a true worship of Nature, and celebrating the charms of the sights and sounds of the fields and woods; and the authors of The Seasons and The Task may be regarded together as the two great landscape painters' of English poetry. Their distinctive peculiarities have already been hinted at in the brief sketch of Thomson's career. The one excels in enthusiasm: the other in the greater correctness of his diction: the one in the splendour and richness of his colouring, the other in the correctness of his drawing.

As to the somewhat different sources of their inspiration, Coleridge has remarked that the love of Nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of Nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into Nature; the other flies to Nature from his fellow-men.' Using the term ' religion' in its received and conventional sense, as equivalent to 'theology,' Cowper's religious opinions appear to have been of the ordinary orthodox type, though, doubtless, with him a real feeling; but, interpreting the word in its better sense, as the creed, or rather practice, of justice, truth, and humanity, the religion of the author of The Task will be allowed to have been the most exalted and noble that can well be imagined. Excepting Thomson and Shelley, no poet has given expression to so noble a profession of faith, and with so much apparent earnestness, as Cowper. However, then, it may have been with the theological prejudices of education or temperament, the traditional creed; in all that belongs to reality his religion may well be thought to have been of the most practical kind.

His former poems were often rugged in style and expression, and were made so on purpose, to avoid the polished uniformity of Pope and his

...

imitators. He was now sensible that he had erred on the opposite side, and accordingly The Task was made to unite strength and freedom with elegance and harmony. No poet has introduced so much idiomatic expression into a grave poem of blank verse; but the higher passages are all carefully finished, and rise or fall, according to the nature of the subject with inimitable grace and melody. In this respect Cowper has greatly the advantage of Thomson, whose stately march is never relaxed, however trivial be the theme. The variety of The Task in style and manner, no less than in subject, is one of its greatest charms. The mock heroic opening is a fine specimen of his humour, and from this he slides into rural description and moral reflection so naturally and easily, that the reader is carried along apparently without an effort. The scenery of the Ouse--its level plains and spacious meads, is described with the vividness of painting. . . . From the beginning to the end of The Task we never lose sight of the author. His love of country rambles, his walks with Mrs. Unwin, when he had exchanged the Thames for the Ouse, and had "grown sober in the vale of years;" his playful satire and tender admonition, his denunciation of slavery, his noble patriotism, his devotional earnestness and sublimity, his warm sympathy with his fellow-men, and his exquisite paintings of domestic peace and happiness, are all so much self-portraiture, drawn with the ripe taste and skill of the master, yet with a modesty that shrinks from the least obtrusiveness and display.' (Cyclopedia of English Literature.) In his great work the popular religionism is not so offensively obtruded as in most of his lesser poems. The wisdom which he imbibed from his silent communings with Nature had doubtless corrected in great measure if it had not altogether obliterated, the early prejudices of education and tradition, intensified, as they were, by that terrible malady which darkened the life of one of the most estimable of thinkers and writers.

THE TASK.

ART AND NATURE.

LOVELY indeed the mimic works of Art,
But Nature's works far lovelier. I admire,
None more admires, the painter's magic skill,
Who shows me that which I shall never see,
Conveys a distant country into mine,
And throws Italian light on English walls:
But imitative strokes can do no more

Than please the eye-sweet Nature every sense.
The air salubrious of her lofty hills,

The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales,
And music of her woods-no works of man
May rival these: these all bespeak a power
Peculiar, and exclusively her own.
Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast;
'Tis free to all-'tis every day renew'd;
Who scorns it, starves deservedly at home.
He does not scorn it, who, imprison'd long
In some unwholesome dungeon, and a prey
To sallow sickness, which the vapours dank
And clammy of his dark abode have bred,
Escapes at last to liberty and light:

His cheek recovers soon its healthful hue,
His eye relumines its extinguish'd fires;

He walks, he leaps, he runs-is wing'd with joy,
And riots in the sweets of every breeze.
He does not scorn it, who has long endured
A fever's agonies, and fed on drugs:
Nor yet the mariner, his blood inflamed
With acrid salts; his very heart athirst
To gaze at Nature in her green array,
Upon the ship's tall sides he stands, possess'd
With visions prompted by intense desire:
Fair fields appear below, such as he left
Far distant, such as he would die to find:-
He seeks them headlong, and is seen no more.

The Sofa.

NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM.

Oн for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,

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