Critics are agreed that we shall not rank him among the great poets; but he comes nearer to their rank than anybody in his day believed possible. He is so true; he is so tender; he is so natural. If in his longer poems there is sometimes a lack of last finish, and an overplus of language—there is a frankness of utterance and a billowy undulation of movement that have compensating charms. He loves Nature as a boy loves his play; his humanities are wakened by all her voices. He not only seizes upon exterior effects with a painter's eye and hand, but he has a touch which steals deeper meanings and influences and transfers them into verse that flows softly and quietly as summer brooks. He cannot speak or rhyme but the odors of the country cling to his words. There is no crazy whirl of expletives which would apply to a hundred scenes, but clear, forceful epithet, full of singleness of story:—
Far spires lifting over stretches of yellow grass-grown plain; marsh birds trailing their flight by sluggish rivers; boats dragged slumberously at noon-tide with seething bubbles in their wake; great banks of woodland, wading through snows, or throwing shadows by morning, and counter-shadows at evening, over the flanks of low hills on which they stand in leafy platoons. And for sounds—far off church-bells waking solitudes with their tremulous beat and jangle; birds chasing the echoes of their own songs; bees murmurous over banks of thyme; cattle lowing in the meadows; or the bay of some hound—breaking full and clear, and lost again—as he follows, far off, some cold trail amongst the hills.
Above all—he is English; the household has for him the sanctity of an altar; firesides are lighted and glow with a sacred warmth; home interests are always golden. Prone to idleness he is perhaps—mental and physical; much femininity in him; his thought wavering and riding on his rhyme. But he is good, kind; crudest to himself—sticking the John Newton darts of Calvinism into his conscience, and loving the pain of them.
I think we must always respect the name and the work of William Cowper. In our next chapter we shall listen to the music of a different singer, and to the story of a jollier, and yet of a far sadder life.
[[1]] As a matter of curiosity I give what appears to be the corresponding Gaelic in a couplet of lines, from the version in Rev. Archibald Clerk's Ossian:—
"A's gile na 'n cobhar,' tha sgavilte
Air muir o ghaillinn nan sian."
l. 75, Duan 1, Fionnghal.
[[2]] James Macpherson: b. 1736; d. 1796.
[[3]] Mr. Mackenzie (Diss. lxxxvii., Edit. Highland Soc., London, 1807) says that he (Macpherson) took some of his Gaelic MSS. to Florida with him and many were lost there.