Make cruel inroads in the brain,”
how much happier had he been, how much more might he have accomplished. Pity, not censure; charity, not severity, are due to the interesting sufferer, who had too much timidity to read aloud before his superiors, thereby losing a good office. That, however, was a trifle, compared with the deep fountain of melancholy that existed within him, whose waters no kind angel descending from heaven healed by casting in some celestial gift. Religion itself became tinged with the dark coloring of the disease it would relieve. To most pilgrims of Time the “New Year” is a cheerful season. “Happy” wishes then fly in clusters all around the domestic and the social circles. How does Cowper speak of the old year? “I looked back upon all the passages and occurrences of it as a traveler looks back upon a wilderness, through which he has passed with weariness and sorrow of heart, reaping no other fruit of his labor than the poor consolation, that, dreary as the desert was, he left it all behind him.” While indulging a similar strain of lugubriousness, his thoughts fall into the natural language of the poet: “Nature revives again, but a soul once slain, lives no more. The hedge that has been apparently dead is not so: it will burst into leaf, and blossom at the appointed time; but no such time is appointed for the stake that stands in it. It is as dead as it seems, and will prove itself no dissembler.” Mournfully beautiful! And thus had he been talking for eleven lingering years, long enough to make “despair an inveterate habit.”
We do not recollect that any of the biographers of Cowper have given sufficient weight, if they have even adverted to one very natural cause of depression, the destitution of any regular profession or employment for nearly seventy years, with no wife to love, no children to provide for. It were enough to wither even a joyous temperament. “The color of our whole life,” said Cowper, “is generally such as the first three or four years in which we are our own masters make it. Then it is that we may be said to shape our own destiny, and to treasure up for ourselves a series of future successes or disappointments.” Those years were spent in idleness, to the influence of which was added the effect of his mortifying failure as clerk to the House of Lords, thus throwing him upon any chance resources for the supply of the various wants of life. The final result was the providential overruling of the whole to the production of a consummate poet. “Had I employed my time as wisely as you,” he writes to his friend, Mr. Rose, “in a situation very similar to yours, I had never been a poet perhaps, but I might by this time have acquired a character of more importance in society.”
He had reached fifty years before Fame had dropped a single wreath upon his brow, or he had even seriously courted the poetic Muse. “Dejection of spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an author, made me one. I find constant employment necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly employed.” He seems to have thought that the season of winter was the most congenial to the operations of his mind and the productions of his fancy. “The season of the year which generally pinches off the flowers of poetry, unfolds mine, such as they are, and crowns me with a winter garland. In this respect, therefore, I and my contemporary bards are by no means upon a par. They write when the delightful influence of fine weather, fine prospects, and a brisk motion of the animal spirits make poetry almost the language of nature; and I, when icicles depend from all the leaves of the Parnassian laurel, and when a reasonable man would as little expect to succeed in verse, as to hear a blackbird whistle.” The very spirit of modesty breathing through language deeply poetical! It is the province of genius, in its imaginative forms, to render tributary to its object the whole circle of the seasons, and to expound the thousand occult meanings of nature in her depths and her varieties, as well as to exhibit the more obvious images of beauty, of which she furnishes in such profusion the striking originals. Hear the voice of his Muse apostrophizing even stern Winter:
“I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness!”
Bachelor as he was, he sought his chief happiness in the interior sanctities of domestic life. There his gentle spirit was nourished with the aliment drawn from the purest sources of friendship and virtue, and thence his imagination took its flights, not bold, but beautiful, not ascending to the lofty height of Milton’s “great argument,” but holding its graceful way through that middle region of thought, and fancy, and feeling, familiar to the mass of minds in any measure susceptible to the beauties of poetry. The critics of half a century ago, while they hesitated to admit Cowper to that high rank among the great poets, which has been adjudged him by the verdict of posterity, confessed that his works contained many traits of strong and original genius, and a richness of idiomatic phraseology seldom equalled in the English language. Readers of poetry had become so accustomed to the refined diction and polished versification of his predecessors—Addison, Pope, Gray, and Prior—that they were slow to welcome a new aspirant for the bays, who came with a free, unfettered, and even somewhat careless air to claim their homage. He might gather a few humble flowers along the sides of Parnassus, but to think of reaping near its summit was the height of presumption. Yet which of those poets has now so many readers as Cowper? Goldsmith may better compare with him for permanence and extent of interest, so eminently natural is he; but what shall be said of Dryden, earlier, it is true, than the others, but one who had long been considered as having passed into the apotheosis of the Dii majores? He may have one reader to five hundred who luxuriate in Cowper’s parlor, alcove, and garden, with the Task in hand.
Then for purity, what a contrast between these last two. The Bard of Christianity, as he has been called, wrote no line, which, “dying he would wish to blot.” To Cowper the sentiment is more impressively applicable by the suffrage of the public mind, than Thomson, to whom it is applied by Lord Lyttleton—and deservedly so. They both communed with Nature, the one with her minute lights and shades, the other with her grander forms and more striking developments. The imagination of Cowper, like the microscopic glass, detected the shape and tint of the very petal of a flower. That of Thomson ranged with the sweep of the telescope through fields of light, and distant spheres, radiant with beauty and vocal with harmony. Each fulfilled his mission with dignity, propriety, and devotion, causing us to pray O! si sic omnes! But the nineteenth century has produced so much mysticism, such an amount of nebulous metaphysics in poetry and prose, as to make some honest people doubt the lawfulness of their veneration for the standard poets, especially the more intelligible ones, or whether there is any such thing as standard poetry. Coleridge, indeed, is clear, solemn, and sublime, when he approaches nearest to Milton, as in his Sunrise Hymn; and Wordsworth is most natural, perspicuous, and impressive, when he most resembles Cowper; but Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning—what do they mean in half their poetry?
Cowper stands almost alone in having nothing to do with the passion of love, which has always figured at such a rate in all sorts of novels, dramas, and poems. It was not because he was destitute of sensibility. His life was a tender sentiment, his heart was formed for friendship; he was even an admirer of the female sex, and he entrusted the happiness of his life to the care and sympathy of female friends; but the romance of the tender passion was beneath the dignity of his Muse, while for real purity of affection, as well as of imagination, no poet has been more distinguished. He possesses the sweetness, if not the grandeur of Milton; and if he does not emulate the song of the Seraphim, who, in their exalted spheres, minister so near the throne of the Eternal, his strain is ever coincident with the thousand choral harmonies of nature and mind around him. In speaking of the influence of the “country” upon his mind, even that country which “God made,” he says, with enthusiasm,
“I never framed a wish, or formed a plan,