"Præsentiorem conspicimus Deum
Per invias rupes, fera per juga,
Clivosque præruptos sonantes,
Inter aquas, nemorumque noctem."
Or, as the same sentiment is expressed by Cowper,
"His are the mountains, and the valleys his,
And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy
With a propriety that none can feel,
But who, with filial confidence inspired,
Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say,—'My Father made them all!'"
It is striking to what an extent the greatest poets of all ages and countries have called in religion, under some form or other, to their assistance. How are the Iliad and Odyssey ennobled by their mythological machinery; by the scales of Fate, the frown of Jove, and the intercession of Minerva! How anxiously does Virgil labour to give a moral and religious character to his Georgics and Æneid! And how nobly do these kindred spirits, by a bold fiction bordering upon truth, display the eternal mansions of joy and of misery, of reward and of punishment; thus disclosing, not by the light of revelation, but by the blended flashes of genius and tradition, the strongest incentives to virtue, and the most terrific penalties of crime.
The same may be affirmed of many of our own most distinguished poets; of "the sage and serious Spenser," and the immortal author of "the Paradise Lost" himself. Nor can we hesitate to trace the deep interest continually excited by the poetry of Cowper, in great measure, to the same source. Though often careless in the structure of his verse; though sometimes lame, and lengthy, and prosaic in his manner; though frequently employed about unpopular topics; he is perhaps the most popular, with the exception of one, of all the English poets: and we believe that the main source of his general acceptance is the fact that he never fails to introduce the Creator into the scenes of his own universe; that, by the soarings of his own mind, he lifts us from earth to heaven, and "makes us familiar with a world unseen;" that he draws largely from the mine of Scripture, and thus exhibits the majesty and love of the Divine Being, in words and imagery which the great object of his wonder and love Himself provides.
It is wholly needless for us to refer to any particular parts of the works of our author, as illustrative of his deep and sanguine spirit of piety. That spirit breathes through every line, and letter. It is, if we may so speak, the animating soul of his verses. The mind of the Christian reader is refreshed, in every step of his progress, by the conviction that the songs thus sung on earth were taught from Heaven; and that, in resigning himself to the sweetest associate for this world, he is choosing the very best guide to another. Indeed, few have been disposed to deny to Cowper the highest of all poetical titles—that of The Poet of Christianity. In this field he has but one rival, the author of the "Paradise Lost." And happily the provinces which they have chosen for themselves within the sacred enclosure are, for the most part, so distinct, that it is scarcely necessary to bring them into comparison. The distinguishing qualities of Milton are a surpassing elevation of thought and energy of expression, which leave the mind scarcely able to breathe under the pressure of his majesty, courage, and sublimity. The main defect of his poetry, as has been justly stated by an anonymous critic, is "the absence of a charm neither to be named nor defined, which would render the whole as lovely as it is beautiful, and as captivating as it is sublime." "His poetry," it is added by the same critic, "will be ever praised by the many, and read by the few. The weakest capacity may be offended by its faults, but it requires a genius equal to his own to comprehend and enjoy all his merits.
"Cowper rarely equals Milton in sublimity, to which his subjects but seldom led; he excels him in easy expression, delicate pleasantry, and generous satire; and he resembles him in the temperate use of all his transcendent abilities. He never crushes his subject by falling upon it, nor permits his subject to crush him by falling beneath it. Invested with a sovereign command of diction, and enjoying unlimited freedom of thought, he is never prodigal of words, and he never riots amidst the exuberance of his conceptions; his economy displays his wealth, and his moderation is the proof of his power; his richest phrases seem the most obvious expression of his ideas, and his mightiest exertions are made apparently without toil. This, as we have already observed, is one of the grandest characteristics of Milton. It would be difficult to name a third poet of our country who could claim a similar distinction. Others, like Cowley, overwhelm their theme with their eloquence, or, like Young, sink exhausted beneath it, by aiming at magnificent, but unattainable, compression; a third class, like Pope, whenever they write well, write their best, and never win but at full speed, and with all their might; while a fourth, like Dryden and Churchill, are confident of their strength, yet so careless of their strokes, that when they conquer, it seems a matter of course, and when they fall, a matter of no consequence, for they can rise again as soon as they please. Milton and Cowper alone appear always to walk within the limits of their genius, yet up to the height of their great argument. We are not pretending to exalt them above all other British poets; we have only compared them together on one point, wherein they accord with each other, and differ from the rest. But there is one feature of resemblance between them of a nobler kind. These good and faithful servants, who had received ten talents each, neither buried them in the earth, nor expended them for their own glory, nor lavished them in profligacy, but occupied them for their Master's service; and we trust have both entered into his joy. Their unfading labours, (not subject to change, from being formed according to the fashion of this world, but being of equal and eternal interest to man in all ages,) have disproved the idle and impious position which vain philosophy, hating all godliness, has endeavoured to establish,—that religion can neither be adorned by poetry, nor poetry ennobled by religion."[798]
Having thus noticed some of those grand peculiarities in the mind of Cowper, which appear to have mainly contributed to place him among the highest order of poets, we proceed to point out some subordinate qualifications, without which, those already referred to would have failed to raise him to his present elevation. Even the buoyant spirit of a poet has certain inferior members by which it is materially assisted in its upward flight.
In the first place, then, he was one of the most simple and natural of all writers. With the exception of the sacred volume, it would perhaps be impossible to name any compositions with so large a proportion of simple ideas and Saxon monosyllables. He began to be an author when Pope, with his admirable critic Johnson, had established a taste for all that was most ornate, pompous, and complicated in phraseology. But, with due respect for the genius and power of this class of writers, he may be said to have hewn out for himself a new path to glory. It has been justly said by an accomplished modern critic and poet, that, "between the school of Dryden and Pope, with their few remembered successors, not one of whom ranks now above a fourth-rate poet; for Young, Thomson, Goldsmith, Gray, and Collins, though flourishing in the interval, were not of their school, but all, in their respective ways, originals;—between the school of Dryden and Pope, and our undisciplined, independent contemporaries, Cowper stands as having closed the age of the former illustrious masters, and commenced that of the eccentric leaders of the modern fashions in song. We cannot stop to trace the affinity which he bears to either of these generations, so dissimilar from each other; but it would be easy to show how little he owed to his immediate forerunners, and how much his immediate followers have been indebted to him. All the cant phrases, all the technicalities, of the former school he utterly threw away, and by his rejection of them they became obsolete. He boldly adopted cadences of verse unattempted before, which though frequently uncouth, and sometimes scarcely reducible to rhythm, were not seldom ingeniously significant, and signally energetic. He feared not to employ colloquial, philosophical, judicial idioms, and forms of argument, and illustrations, which enlarged the vocabulary of poetical terms, less by recurring to obsolete ones, (which has been too prodigally done since,) than by hazardous, and generally happy innovations of more recent origin, which have become graceful and dignified by usage, though Pope and his imitators durst not have touched them. The eminent adventurous revivers of English poetry about thirty years ago, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, in their blank verse, trod directly in the steps of Cowper, and, in their early productions at least, were each, in a measure, what he made them. Our author may be legitimately styled the father of this triumvirate, who are, in truth, the living fathers of the innumerable race of moderns, whom no human ingenuity could well classify into their respective schools."[799]
The simplicity of Cowper as a thinker, examiner, and writer, is unquestionably one of his greatest charms. He constantly reminds us of a highly-gifted and intelligent child. In all that he says and does, there is a total absence of all plot and stratagem, of all pretensions to think profoundly, or write finely; though, without an effort, he does both. His manner is to invite you to walk abroad with him amidst the glories of nature; to fix at random on some point in the landscape; to display its beauties or its peculiarities—to touch on some feature which has, perhaps, altogether escaped your own eye—to pour out the simplest thoughts in the simplest language—and to make you feel that never man before had so sweet, so moral, so devout, so affectionate, so gifted, so musical a companion. The simplicity of his style is, we believe, considering its strength, without a parallel. No author, perhaps, has done more to recover the language of our country from the grasp and tyranny of a foreign idiom, and to teach English people to speak in English accents. In some instances, it may be granted, that he is somewhat more colloquial and homely than the dignity of his subject warrants. But for offences of this kind he makes the amplest compensation, by leading us to those "wells of undefiled English," at which he had drunk so deeply, and whence alone the pure streams of our national composition are to be drawn.