But the examples of this species of personification are without number; and we are not afraid to bring many of them into comparison with the Discord of Homer, the Fame of Virgil, or the Famine of Ovid—passages of so powerful a cast as at once, and without any assistance, to establish the poetical authority of their inventors.
It may seem strange to some, that we should assign a place, among the poetical claims of Cowper, to his strong sense. He appears to us to be one of the most just, natural, and rational of all writers; and, however Poetry may seem to appropriate to herself rather the remote and visionary regions of fiction than that of dull reality, we are disposed to think, that, even in her wildest wanderings, she will maintain no real and permanent ascendency over the mind, if she widely deviates from nature and good sense. "Monstrous sights," says Beattie, and he might have added, monstrous conceptions, "please but for a moment, if they please at all; for they derive their charm merely from the beholders' amazement. I have read indeed of a man of rank in Sicily who chooses to adorn his villa with pictures and statues of the most unnatural deformity. But it is a singular instance; and one would not be much more surprised to hear of a man living without food, or growing fat upon poison. To say of anything that it is 'contrary to nature,' denotes censure and disgust on the part of the speaker; as the epithet 'natural' intimates an agreeable quality, and seems, for the most part, to imply that a thing is as it ought to be, suitable to our own taste, and congenial to our own disposition.... Think how we should relish a painting in which there was no regard to colours, proportions, or any of the physical laws of nature; where the eyes and ears of animals were placed in their shoulders; where the sky was green, and the grass crimson." Such distortions and anomalies would not be less offensive in poetry than in the sister art. And it is one of the main sources of delight in Cowper, that all is in its due proportion, and wears its right colours; that the "eyes and ears" are in "their proper places;" that his skies are blue, and his grass is green; and that every reflection of the poet has, what he himself calls the
"Stamp and clear impression of good sense."
The very passage in the sixth book of "The Task" from which this line is taken, and which furnishes perhaps the most perfect uninspired delineation of a true Christian, supplies, at the same time, an admirable example of the quality we mean; and shows, that even where his feelings were the most intensely interested, his passions were under the control of his reason; that, when he mounted the chariot of the sun, he took care not to approach too near the flaming luminary.
It would be impossible, in a sketch such as this, not to advert to the powers of the author as a satirist. And here, we think the most partial critic will be scarcely disposed to deny, that he sometimes handles his knife a little at random and with too much severity. He had early in life been intimate with Churchill; and, with scarcely a touch of the temper of that right English poet, had plainly caught something of his manner. There is this wide distinction between him and his master—that his irony and rebuke are never the weapons of party, or personality, but of truth, honour, and the public good. The strong, though homely, image applied by Churchill to another critic,—
"Like a butcher, doom'd for life
In his mouth to wear his knife,"—
is too just a picture of its author, but is infinitely far from being that of Cowper. It was well said of his satire, that "it was the offspring of benevolence; and that, like the Pelian spear, it furnishes the only cure for the wound it inflicts. When he is obliged to blame, he pities; when he condemns, it is with regret. His censures display no triumphant superiority; but rather express a turn of feeling such as we might suppose angels to indulge in at the prospect of human frailty."
But, if his satirical powers were sometimes indulged to excess, it is impossible to deny that he was, generally and habitually, of all poets the most sympathizing and tender. Nothing in human composition can surpass the tenderness of the poem on receiving his mother's picture, or of those exquisite lines addressed to a lady in France suffering under deep calamity, of which last we shall quote a few for the ornament of our page:—
"The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown:
No trav'ller ever reach'd that blest abode,
Who found not thorns and briers in his road.
The world may dance along the flowery plain,
Cheer'd as they go by many a sprightly strain,
Where Nature has her mossy velvet spread
With unshod feet they yet securely tread,
Admonish'd, scorn the caution and the friend,
Bent all on pleasure, heedless of its end.
But He, who knew what human hearts would prove,
How slow to learn the dictates of his love,
That, hard by nature, and of stubborn will,
A life of ease would make them harder still,
In pity to the souls his grace design'd
To rescue from the ruins of mankind,
Call'd for a cloud to darken all their years,
And said, 'Go, spend them in the vale of tears.'
O balmy gales of soul-reviving air!
O salutary streams that murmur there!
These flowing from the fount of grace above,
Those breathed from lips of everlasting love."