Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,
The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.
This introduces a rural digression.
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted.
We think of
a river winding slow
By cattle, on an endless plain;
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow streaks of rain.
How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement," welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, "The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen of the softest kind," he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough's, and studies of cattle like Morland's. "The Task" won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may still be read with sympathy and pleasure.
Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories: "The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad; the ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of
The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which Cowper's translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The Swallow," "Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the original, as is "The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters such as "The Dog and the Water-lily"; and pretty kindly compliments, such as "Gratitude" (to his cousin, Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the "Epitaph on a Hare," and the "To Mary" (of 1793). His "John Gilpin" is an unusual frolic.