adorn the poems of Cowper, and rank him among the foremost on the mount of Parnassus. We hope to be excused in closing this brief sketch, if we add the opinion of a writer on the poetical genius of Cowper, the language which it breathes is quite in accordance with our own opinion. "The rise of this great moral poet marks a distinct and most resplendent era in the annals of our country's literature. He ranks among the foremost of those intellectual Anakim who have achieved the mightiest victories of British song. The man of his own deeds, the sole and unassisted architect of his own immortality, he has built for himself a fabric which, though peculiar in design and utterly unlike the monumental structures of his brethren, is yet of perfect and consistent symmetry. He belonged to no school; he copied no one's manner. His style of thought and of expression, his choice and treatment of subject, his metaphors and illustrations, even the cadences and pauses of his verse, are all emphatically self-originated and his own. He was the first who dared to lay aside that artificial phraseology and complicated rhythmus, which the long-admitted supremacy and frequent imitation of Pope had sanctioned as the exclusive form of narrative or didactic poetry. The cœsural balance of antitheses had, in itself, no singular and overmastering charm for him the prerogative authority of names and arbitrary customs he boldly set at defiance, and feared not to assert the native individual liberty of creation. He avoided, also, equally with that of his precursors, the error into which too many of his successors have inadvertently fallen. none of Cowper's writings, not even in their most In xvi MEMOIR OF WILLIAM COWPER. vigorous bursts of passion, have we ought that can be censured as ambiguous or unintelligible. Nowhere do we discover any traces of that undisciplined and perplexing inspiration, if such it must be called, which, disdaining the coercion of an intellectual law, attempts to give utterance to its oracles in a language of its own, and discards their natural interpreter. In all his poems, we do not remember a single obscure, confusing or inexplicable passage; nor one of indefinite and undefinable significance. In the works of Byron and our own contemporaries, such passages are met with in almost every page; but in Cowper they are not. Everywhere his meaning is perspicuous, as his sentiments are high and generous. His images, his characters, the total contexture of his verse, are all impregnated with the nobility and intrinsic grandeur of his mind, and imbued with that benign and gracious spirit of Christian virtue which was as the pure breath and blood of his ideal progeny. His victories were not the stained and perishing achievements of rebellious power; not the inglorious triumphs of perverted genius, nor the subjugation of all hearts to the dominion of voluptuous melody and magical illusion: he raised no idols; he set up no golden images. His were unsullied and memorably peaceful conquests; conquests of passions and prejudices; of the ignorance, the follies, and the vices of mankind; conquests illustrated by splendours to which the thrones and chariots of the imperial pageantry of Rome were but as toys and baubles, invested with the undying glories of a spiritual consecration and the imperishable lustre religion." smi have ⚫ 299 301 302 303 Sonnet addressed to Henry Cowper, Esq. Lines addressed to Dr. Darwin, On Mrs. Montagu's Feather-Hangings. ib. IV. The Parrot.-Translation of the foregoing. Translation of Prior's Chloe and Euphelia The Diverting History of John Gilpin, showing how An Epistle to an afflicted Protestant Lady in France 334 Report of an adjudged case, not to be found in any On the burning of Lord Mansfield's library, together A Hymn, for the use of the Sunday School at Olney Gratitude, addressed to Lady Hesketh, 1786 On the Queen's visit to London, the night of the Inscription for the tomb of Mr. Hamilton. |