The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield Of prudent lore, The billows rage, and gales blow hard, Such fate to suffering worth is given, To mis'ry's brink, Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heaven, He, ruin'd, sink! Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight Shall be thy doom! BRUCE TO HIS MEN AT BANNOCKBURN. Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Now's the day, and now's the hour, Wha will be a traitor-knave? Let him turn and flee! Wha for Scotland's king and law By oppression's woes and pains! Lay the proud usurpers low ! TO A BROTHER-POET. What though, like commoners of air, Yet Nature's charms, the hills and woods, In days when daisies deck the ground, On braes when we please, then Then let us cheerfu' acquiesce, * And, even should misfortunes come, They make us see the naked truth, Though losses and crosses There's wit there, ye'll get there, OF A' THE AIRTS THE WIND CAN BLAW. Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly like the west, For there the bonnie lassie lives, The lassie I lo'e best: There wild woods grow, and rivers row, And mony a hill between; But day and night my fancy's flight I see her in the dewy flowers, I hear her in the tunefu' birds, making much more. 4 learning. There's not a bonnie flower that springs, O, blaw ye westlin' winds, blaw saft Wi' balmy gale, frae hill and dale, What sighs and vows amang the knowes COWPER. WILLIAM COWPER was born at his father's rectory of Berkhampstead A.D. 1731. He was placed at a school in Bedfordshire, where he suffered such cruelties from a schoolfellow as apparently affected his sensitive nature for the whole of his life. He had not energy for the bar, for which profession he had been intended; and though appointed "Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords," such was his nervousness that he was unable to encounter the public examination necessary for holding it. In 1765 he repaired to Hunting. don, where he lived as a boarder at the house of Mr. Unwin, the clergyman of the parish. He continued to reside with that family when, after Mr. Unwin's death, they had settled near Olney, where he became an intimate of the celebrated Mr. Newton, then curate of the place, with whom, in his charitable ministrations, Cowper gladly associated himself. Here he was again attacked by a malady which had before affected him, a religious melancholy amounting to aberration of intellect. For five years he lay under this eclipse, during all which time Mrs. Unwin watched over him with maternal tenderness. Getting better, he occupied himself with gardening, drawing, and the domestication of hares and birds. He began again to pay serious attention to poetry, in which it is a remarkable circumstance that he had done nothing of importance till after he was fifty years old. His first volume was received somewhat coldly by the public; but the valetudinarian had strength enough to be neither disappointed nor discouraged. In 1784 he wrote his "Task” at the request of his cousin, Lady Hesketh; and in the same year commenced his translation of Homer. In 1792 his former malady began to return, induced apparently in some measure by his grief at the declining health of Mrs. Unwin, who languished for some years in paralysis. He died A.D. 1800; having been able the preceding year to resume his labours on Homer. To the fostering friendship of the Unwins, Lady Hesketh, Lady Austen, and a few other friends, Cowper owed nearly all the happiness allowed to his shattered life. Yet, in his helplessness, he was able largely to affect the literature of his country, and consequently its moral and social well-being; nor is it unlikely that the beneficial influence exercised by him may be felt for centuries. More than any one else, except perhaps Burns, he contributed to bring back English poetry from convention to nature, and from French models to a renewed admiration for the great olden poets of native growth. In Burns and in Cowper the love of nature was equally marked; but in all beside there was little affinity between them. Where the former was weak, the latter was strong; and so largely do Cowper's works belong to the meditative class, that but for the moral wisdom of the poet, and the purity of his cheerless but blameless life, his poetry would have had little merit or interest. His works are a joint bequest from his genius and his virtues. In his descriptions of scenery, Cowper is always truthful; though his delineations belong to the minute, not the sublime order. His meditative vein is rich in the true wisdom of the heart; and, notwithstanding the aberrations by which his mind was so long clouded, it is for nothing more remarkable than its complete sanity of tone and absence of morbidness, or false enthusiasm. Perhaps Cowper's highest merit is his pathos. Of this quality beautiful specimens are left to us in his lines "on his mother's picture," and in those addressed "to Mary." In the last his aged friend Mrs. Unwin, then dying, is commemorated with a pious tenderness. It may be called the love-song of old age. A WINTER WALK. The night was winter in his roughest mood; And where the woods fence off the northern blast, And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue |