No light propitious shone,
When, far from all effectual aid,
We perished—each alone—
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in blacker gulfs than he.”
[12.] His greatest work is The Task; and the best poem in it is probably “The Winter Evening.” His best-known poem is John Gilpin, which, like “The Task,” he wrote at the request of his friend, Lady Austen. His most powerful poem is The Castaway. He always writes in clear, crisp, pleasant, and manly English. He himself says, in a letter to a friend: “Perspicuity is always more than half the battle... A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning;” and this direction he himself always carried out. Cowper’s poems mark a new era in poetry; his style is new, and his ideas are new. He is no follower of Pope; Southey compared Pope and Cowper as “formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery.” He is always original, always true—true to his own feeling, and true to the object he is describing. “My descriptions,” he writes of “The Task,” “are all from nature; not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience.” Everywhere in his poems we find a genuine love of nature; humour and pathos in his description of persons; and a purity and honesty of style that have never been surpassed. Many of his well-put lines have passed into our common stock of everyday quotations. Such are—
“God made the country, and man made the town.”
“Variety’s the very spice of life
That gives it all its flavour.”
“The heart