Cowper’s familiar description of a newspaper, with its multiform intelligence, and the pleasure of reading it in the country, never tires, and in this place is to the purpose.
This folio of four pages, happy work!
Which not ev’n critics criticise; that holds
Inquisitive Attention, while I read,
Fast bound in chains of silence, which the fair,
Though eloquent themselves, yet fear to break,
What is it, but a map of busy life,
Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
Births, deaths, and marriages———————
——————————The grand debate,
The popular harangue, the tart reply,
The logic, and the wisdom, and the wit,
And the loud laugh———————————
Cat’racts of declamation thunder here;
There forests of no meaning spread the page,
In which all comprehension wanders lost;
While fields of pleasantry amuse us there,
With merry descants on a nation’s woes.
The rest appears a wilderness of strange
But gay confusion; roses for the cheeks,
And lilies for the brows of faded age,
Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald,
Heav’n, earth, and ocean, plunder’d of their sweets,
Nectareous essences, Olympian dews,
Sermons, and city feasts, and fav’rite airs,
Æthereal journies, submarine exploits,
And Katerfelto, with his hair an end
At his own wonders, wand’ring for his bread.
’Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world; to see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;
To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,
At a safe distance, where the dying sound
Falls a soft murmur on th’ uninjured ear.
Thus sitting, and surveying thus, at ease,
The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced
To some secure and more than mortal height,
That lib’rates and exempts us from them all.
This is an agreeable and true picture, and, with like felicity, the poet paints the bearer of the newspaper.
Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge,
That with its wearisome but needful length
Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon
Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright;—
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks
News from all nations lumb’ring at his back.
True to his charge, the close pack’d load behind
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destin’d inn;
And, having dropp’d th’ expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indiff’rent whether grief or joy.
Methinks, as I have always thought, that Cowper here missed the expression of a kind feeling, and rather tends to raise an ungenerous sentiment towards this poor fellow. As the bearer of intelligence, of which he is ignorant, why should it be
“To him indiff’rent whether grief or joy?”
If “cold, and yet cheerful,” he has attained to the “practical philosophy” of bearing ills with patience. He is a frozen creature that “whistles,” and therefore called “light-hearted wretch.” The poet refrains to “look with a gentle eye upon this wretch,” but, having obtained the newspaper, determines to enjoy himself, and cries
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.
This done, and the bard surrounded with means of enjoyment, he directs his sole attention to the newspaper, nor spares a thought in behalf of the wayworn messenger, nor bids him “God speed!” on his further forlorn journey through the wintry blast.
In London scarcely any one knows the newsman but a newsman. His customers know him least of all. Some of them seem almost ignorant that he has like “senses, affections, passions,” with themselves, or is “subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” They are indifferent to him in exact ratio to their attachment to what he “serves” them with. Their regard is for the newspaper, and not the newsman. Should he succeed in his occupation, they do not hear of it: if he fail, they do not care for it. If he dies, the servant receives the paper from his successor, and says, when she carries it up stairs, “If you please, the newsman’s dead:” they scarcely ask where he lived, or his fall occasions a pun—“We always said he was, and now we have proof that he is, the late newsman.” They are almost as unconcerned as if he had been the postman.