That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honest patriotism as it had not
been struck before since Milton, by the familiar lines commencing:
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country!
As also in that stirring ballad “On the Loss of the Royal George:”
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England’s thunder,
And plough the distant main.
There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper did time allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, as one who had more than a superficial affection for it—the superficial affection of Thomson and Gray—and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as a lover of animal life. Cowper’s love of nature was the less effective than Wordsworth’s only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth’s advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was far less platonic than Wordsworth’s. To his hares and his pigeons and all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he had in him the blood
of kings—for, curiously enough, it is no more difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to William the Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of Queen Victoria—it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him to be more tolerant of “sport” than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper’s vigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrasted with Wordsworth’s “Heart Leap Well,” and you will prefer Cowper or Wordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned English sports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerant than in his prose, for he writes in The Task of:
detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another’s pain,
We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” he borrowed from Berkeley; but his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet, whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of
parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.