Rules universal Nature. Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
Of his unrivaled pencil.”
No doubt Cowper held and believed this firmly, and it may be at times had keen intuition of its truth. But it cannot be said that he attained to make it felt in his ordinary descriptions of the every-day landscape. He does not describe Nature as if he habitually saw it as a living being plastic to an overruling and informing spirit. Rather he beheld her more as common eyes behold her, as a mechanism, with fixed features and a definite outline, which do not spontaneously, and without an exertion of thought, lend themselves as vehicles of spiritual reality. If he had been more possessed with the mystical vision he might have been a higher poet for the few. He would not have been what he has been called, the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear, the familiar companion of every quiet English household. But though Cowper’s “Task” is full of scenery, it is not purely, or even mainly, descriptive poetry. More than its rural character is its deep, tender, universal human-heartedness. Man and his interests are paramount, as paramount as in Pope or any other city poet. Only it is not the conventional, not the surface part of man, but that which is permanent in him and universal. In his indignation against injustice and oppression, his hatred of slavery, his large sense of universal brotherhood, and his revolt against all that hinders it, we already hear in his poetry the not far-off murmur of the Revolution, and of the new era it was bringing in. His denunciation of the Bastile but four years before it fell—
“Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair,
There’s not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last,”—
is a fitting prelude to that prayer of thanksgiving which Wordsworth raised a few years afterward from Morecombe Sands when he first heard of the fall of Robespierre. It is because Cowper’s poetry throbs with this deep and universal human sympathy that its background of landscape, plain as it is, and untransfigured by passion, comes in with such graceful and refreshing relief. Of Cowper’s descriptions may be said what Wordsworth says of his own, there is always
“Some happy tone