Wilson, to the
great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several
other occasions had been favored with the first sight of some of
Cowper's smaller poems.
great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several
other occasions had been favored with the first sight of some of
Cowper's smaller poems.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v07 - Cic to Cuv
But besides that, I shall here speak of myself
only in relation to the subject of these precedent discourses, and
shall be likelier thereby to fall into the contempt than rise up to
the estimation of most people.
As far as my memory can return back into my past life,
before I knew, or was capable of guessing, what the world or
the glories or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul
gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants
are said to turn away from others by an antipathy imperceptible
## p. 4096 (#470) ###########################################
4096
ABRAHAM COWLEY
to themselves and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even
when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running
about on holy-days and playing with my fellows, I was wont to
steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a
book, or with some one companion if I could find any of the
same temper. I was then too so much an enemy to all con-
straint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any per-
suasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common
rules of grammar; in which they dispensed with me alone,
because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercise out
of my own reading and observation. That I was then of the
same mind as I am now (which I confess I wonder at, myself)
may appear by the latter end of an ode which I made when I
was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed with
many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish; but of this
part, which I here set down (if a very little were corrected), I
should hardly now be much ashamed.
THIS only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honor I would have,
Not from great deeds, but good alone;
The unknown are better, than ill known:
Rumor can ope the grave.
Acquaintance I would have, but when't depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.
Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night.
My house a cottage more
Than palace; and should fitting be
For all my use, no luxury.
My garden painted o'er
With nature's hand, not art's; and pleasures yield,
Horace might envy in his Sabin field.
Thus would I double my life's fading space;
For he that runs it well, twice runs his race.
And in this true delight,
These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear, nor wish, my fate;
But boldly say each night,
"To-morrow let my sun his beams display,
Or in clouds hide them; I have lived to-day. "
I
## p. 4097 (#471) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4097
You may see by it, I was even then acquainted with the
poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace); and perhaps
it was the immature and immoderate love of them, which stampt
first, or rather engraved, these characters in me: they were like
letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which with the tree
still grow proportionably. But how this love came to be pro-
duced in me so early, is a hard question: I believe I can tell
the particular little chance that filled my head first with such
chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there: for I
remember, when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in
it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlor (I know not by
what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book
but of devotion), - but there was wont to lie Spenser's works:
this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with
the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave
houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understand-
ing had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tink-
ling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers; so that I think I
had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was
thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.
With these affections of mind, and my heart wholly set upon
letters, I went to the university; but was soon torn from thence
by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to
stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the
princely cedars to me the hyssop. Yet I had as good fortune as
could have befallen me in such a tempest; for I was cast by it
into the family of one of the best persons, and into the court of
one of the best princesses, of the world. Now, though I was
here engaged in ways most contrary to the original design of
my life,— that is, into much company, and no small business,
and into a daily sight of greatness, both militant and triumphant
(for that was the state then of the English and French courts),
yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only
added the confirmation of reason to that which was before but
natural inclination. I saw plainly all the paint of that kind.
of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty which I did not
fall in love with when for aught I knew it was real, was not
like to bewitch or entice me when I saw that it was adulterate.
I met with several great persons, whom I liked very well; but
could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be
liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be
VII-257
## p. 4098 (#472) ###########################################
4098
ABRAHAM COWLEY
in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and
bravely in it: a storm would not agree with my stomach, if it
did with my courage. Though I was in a crowd of as good
company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business
of great and honorable trust, though I ate at the best table, and
enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought
to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and pub-
lic distresses; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old
school-boy's wish, in a copy of verses to the same effect:—
"Well then, I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree," etc.
And I never then proposed to myself any other advantage
from his Majesty's happy Restoration, but the getting into some.
moderately convenient retreat in the country; which I thought,
in that case, I might easily have compassed as well as some
others, who with no greater probabilities or pretenses have
arrived to extraordinary fortune: but I had before written a
shrewd prophecy against myself, and I think Apollo inspired me
in the truth though not in the elegance of it:—
"THOU neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar.
Content thyself with the small barren praise
Which neglected verse does raise. "
She spake; and all my years to come
Took their unlucky doom.
Their several ways of life let others chuse,
Their several pleasures let them use;
But I was born for Love and for a Muse.
With Fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so must end.
The star that did my being frame
Was but a lambent flame,
And some small light it did dispense,
But neither heat nor influence.
No matter, Cowley; let proud Fortune see
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee.
Let all her gifts the portion be
Of folly, lust, and flattery,
Fraud, extortion, calumny,
## p. 4099 (#473) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Murder, infidelity,
Rebellion and hypocrisy.
Do thou nor grieve nor blush to be,
As all th' inspired tuneful men,
And all thy great forefathers were, from Homer down to Ben.
However, by the failing of the forces which I had expected,
I did not quit the design which I had resolved on; I cast myself
into it à corps perdu, without making capitulations, or taking
counsel of fortune. But God laughs at a man who says to his
soul, "Take thy ease. " I met presently not only with many
little incumbrances and impediments, but with so much sickness
(a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness
of an emperor as well as mine; yet I do neither repent nor alter
my course. "Non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum;" nothing
shall separate me from a mistress which I have loved so long
and have now at last married; though she neither has brought
me a rich portion, nor lived yet so quietly with me as I hoped
from her:
"Nec vos, dulcissima mundi
Nomina, vos Musæ, Libertas, Otia, Libri,
Hortique Sylvæque, anima remanente, relinquam,»
(Nor by me e'er shall you,
You, of all names the sweetest and the best,
You, Muses, books, and liberty, and rest;
You, gardens, fields, and woods, forsaken be,
As long as life itself forsakes not me. )
4099
But this is a very pretty ejaculation; because I have concluded
all the other chapters with a copy of verses, I will maintain the
humor to the last.
ON THE DEATH OF CRASHAW
OET and Saint! to thee alone are given
POR
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven;
The hard and rarest union which can be,
Next that of Godhead with humanity.
Long did the Muses banished slaves abide,
And build vain pyramids to mortal pride;
Like Moses, thou (though spells and charms withstand)
Hast brought them nobly home back to their holy land.
## p. 4100 (#474) ###########################################
4100
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Ah, wretched we, poets of earth! but thou
Wert, living, the same poet which thou'rt now;
Whilst angels sing to thee their airs divine,
And joy in an applause so great as thine.
Equal society with them to hold,
Thou need'st not make new songs, but say the old;
And they, kind spirits! shall all rejoice, to see
How little less than they exalted man may be.
Still the old heathen gods in numbers dwell;
The heavenliest thing on earth still keeps up hell;
Nor have we yet quite purged the Christian land;
Still idols here, like calves at Bethel, stand.
And though Pan's death long since all oracles broke,
Yet still in rhyme the fiend Apollo spoke:
Nay, with the worst of heathen dotage, we
Vain men! the monster woman deify;
Find stars, and tie our fates there in a face,
And paradise in them, by whom we lost it, place.
What different faults corrupt our Muses thus?
Wanton as girls, as old wives fabulous!
Thy spotless Muse, like Mary, did contain
The boundless Godhead; she did well disdain
That her eternal verse employed should be
On a less subject than eternity;
And for a sacred mistress scorned to take
But her, whom God himself scorned not his spouse to make.
It (in a kind) her miracle did do;
A fruitful mother was, and virgin too.
How well, blest swan, did Fate contrive thy death,
And make thee render up thy tuneful breath
In thy great mistress's arms, thou most divine
And richest offering of Loretto's shrine!
Where, like some holy sacrifice t' expire,
A fever burns thee, and Love lights the fire.
Angels, they say, brought the famed Chapel there,
And bore the sacred load in triumph through the air:
'Tis surer much they brought thee there; and they,
And thou their charge, went singing all the way.
Pardon, my Mother-Church, if I consent
That angels led him when from thee he went;
For ev'n in error seen no danger is,
When joined with so much piety as his.
## p. 4101 (#475) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Ah, mighty God! with shame I speak't, and grief;
Ah, that our greatest faults were in belief!
And our weak reason were ev'n weaker yet,
Rather than thus our wills too strong for it.
His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right;
And I myself a Catholic will be,
So far at least, great Saint, to pray to thee.
Hail, bard triumphant, and some care bestow
On us, the poets militant below!
Oppressed by our old enemy, adverse chance,
Attacked by envy and by ignorance;
Enchained by beauty, tortured by desires,
Exposed by tyrant Love to savage beasts and fires.
Thou from low earth in nobler flames didst rise,
And like Elijah, mount alive the skies.
Elisha-like, but with a wish much less,
More fit thy greatness and my littleness,
Lo! here I beg - I, whom thou once didst prove
So humble to esteem, so good to love -
Not that thy spirit might on me doubled be,
I ask but half thy mighty spirit for me:
And when my muse soars with so strong a wing,
'Twill learn of things divine, and first of thee, to sing.
ON THE DEATH OF MR. WILLIAM HERVEY
T WAS a dismal and a fearful night;
Scarce could the moon disk on th' unwilling light,
When sleep, death's image, left my troubled breast,
By something liker death possest.
My eyes with tears did uncommanded flow,
And on my soul hung the dull weight
Of some intolerable fate.
What bell was that? ah me! too much I know.
My sweet companion and my gentle peer,
Why hast thou left me thus unkindly here,
Thy end forever, and my life to moan?
Oh, thou hast left me all alone!
Thy soul and body, where death's agony
Besieged around thy noble heart,
Did not with more reluctance part,
Than I, my dearest friend, do part from thee.
4101
## p. 4102 (#476) ###########################################
4102
ABRAHAM COWLEY
My dearest friend, would I had died for thee!
Life and this world henceforth will tedious be;
Nor shall I know hereafter what to do,
If once my griefs prove tedious too.
Silent and sad I walk about all day,
As sullen ghosts stalk speechless by,
Where their hid treasures lie;
Alas! my treasure's gone! why do I stay?
He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
A strong and mighty influence joined our birth:
Nor did we envy the most sounding name
By friendship given of old to fame.
None but his brethren he and sisters knew,
Whom the kind youth preferred to me;
And ev'n in that we did agree,
For much above myself I loved them too.
Say for you saw us, ye immortal lights-
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
Till the Ledæan stars, so famed for love,
Wondered at us from above!
We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine;
But search of deep philosophy,
—
Wit, eloquence and poetry;
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.
Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say
Have ye not seen us walking every day?
Was there a tree about which did not know
The love betwixt us two?
Henceforth, ye gentle trees, forever fade;
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into darksome shades combine,
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid!
Henceforth, no learned youths beneath you sing,
Till all the tuneful birds to your boughs they bring;
No tuneful birds play with their wonted cheer,
And call the learned youths to hear;
No whistling winds through the glad branches fly:
But all, with sad solemnity,
Mute and unmovèd be,
Mute as the grave wherein my friend does lie.
To him my muse made haste with every strain,
Whilst it was new and warm yet from the brain:
## p. 4103 (#477) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4103
He loved my worthless rhymes, and like a friend,
Would find out something to commend.
Hence now, my Muse! thou canst not me delight:
Be this my latest verse,
With which I now adorn his hearse;
And this my grief, without thy help, shall write.
Had I a wreath of bays about my brow,
I should contemn that flourishing honor now,
Condemn it to the fire, and joy to hear
It rage and crackle there.
Instead of bays, crown with sad cypress me;
Cypress, which tombs does beautify;
Not Phoebus grieved so much as I,
For him who first was near that mournful tree.
Large was his soul, as large a soul as e'er
Submitted to inform a body here;
High as the place 'twas shortly in heaven to have,
But low and humble as his grave:
So high, that all the Virtues there did come,
As to their chiefest seat,
Conspicuous and great;
So low, that for me too it made. a room.
He scorned this busy world below, and all
That we, mistaken mortals! pleasure call;
Was filled with innocent gallantry and truth,
Triumphant o'er the sins of youth.
He like the stars, to which he now is gone,
That shine with beams like flame,
Yet burn not with the same,
Had all the light of youth, of the fire none.
Knowledge he only sought, and so soon caught,
As if for him knowledge had rather sought:
Nor did more learning ever crowded lie
In such a short mortality.
Whene'er the skillful youth discoursed or writ,
Still did the nations throng
About his eloquent tongue;
Nor could his ink flow faster than his wit.
So strong a wit did nature to him frame,
As all things but his judgment overcame:
## p. 4104 (#478) ###########################################
4104
ABRAHAM COWLEY
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below;
Oh! had he lived in learning's world, what bound
Would have been able to control
His overpowering soul!
We've lost in him arts that not yet are found.
His mirth was the pure spirits of various wit,
Yet never did his God or friends forget;
And when deep talk and wisdom came in view,
Retired, and gave to them their due:
For the rich help of books he always took,
Though his own searching mind before
Was so with notions written o'er,
As if wise nature had made that her book.
So many virtues joined in him, as we
Can scarce pick here and there in history;
More than old writers' practice e'er could reach;
As much as they could ever teach.
These did Religion, queen of virtues, sway;
And all their sacred motions steer,
Just like the first and highest sphere,
Which wheels about, and turns all heaven one way.
With as much zeal, devotion, piety,
He always lived, as other saints do die.
Still with his soul severe account he kept,
Wiping all debts out ere he slept:
Then down in peace and innocence he lay,
Like the sun's laborious light,
Which still in water sets at night,
Unsullied with his journey of the day.
Wondrous young man! why wert thou made so good,
To be snatched hence ere better understood?
Snatched before half of thee enough was seen!
Thou ripe, and yet thy life but green!
Nor could thy friends take their last sad farewell;
But danger and infectious death
Maliciously seized on that breath
Where life, spirit, pleasure, always used to dwell.
But happy thou, ta'en from this frantic age,
Where ignorance and hypocrisy does rage!
## p. 4105 (#479) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4105
A fitter time for heaven no soul e'er chose,
The place now only free from those.
There 'mong the blest thou dost forever shine,
And wheresoe'er thou cast thy view
Upon that white and radiant crew,
Seest not a soul clothed with more light than thine.
And if the glorious saints cease not to know
Their wretched friends who fight with life below,
Thy flame to me does still the same abide,
Only more pure and rarefied.
There, whilst immortal hymns thou dost rehearse,
Thou dost with holy pity see
Our dull and earthly poesy,
Where grief and misery can be joined with verse.
A
A SUPPLICATION
WAKE, awake, my Lyre!
And tell thy silent master's humble tale
In sounds that may prevail;
Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire
Though so exalted she,
And I so lowly be,
Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.
Hark! how the strings awake;
And though the moving hand approach not near,
Themselves with awful fear
A kind of numerous trembling make.
Now all thy forces try,
Now all thy charms apply;
Revenge upon her ear the conquests of her eye.
Weak Lyre! thy virtue sure
Is useless here, since thou art only found
To cure, but not to wound,
And she to wound, but not to cure.
Too weak, too, wilt thou prove
My passion to remove;
Physic to other ills, thou'rt nourishment to love.
Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre!
For thou canst never tell my humble tale
In sounds that will prevail,
## p. 4106 (#480) ###########################################
4106
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Nor gentle thoughts in her inspire;
All thy vain mirth lay by;
Bid thy strings silent lie;
Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre, and let thy master die.
EPITAPH ON A LIVING AUTHOR
ERE, passenger, beneath this shed,
Lies Cowley, though entombed, not dead;
Yet freed from human toil and strife,
And all th' impertinence of life.
H
Who in his poverty is neat,
And even in retirement great,
With Gold, the people's idol, he
Holds endless war and enmity.
Can you not say, he has resigned
His breath, to this small cell confined?
With this small mansion let him have
The rest and silence of the grave:
Strew roses here as on his hearse,
And reckon this his funeral verse;
With wreaths of fragrant herbs adorn
The yet surviving poet's urn.
## p. 4106 (#481) ###########################################
## p. 4106 (#482) ###########################################
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4
WILLIAM COWPER
## p. 4107 (#485) ###########################################
4107
WILLIAM COWPER
(1731-1800)
HE poet Cowper, who stands in the gap that separates Pope
from Wordsworth, belongs to the group that includes Thom-
son, Young, Goldsmith, and Crabbe. If he is unimportant
to-day in comparison with his importance to his own time, yet his
service to English poetry is great, for he dispersed the artificial
atmosphere which Pope had thrown around it. His moods and his
keys were alike limited, and he was soon overshadowed by Words-
worth. Cowper saw Nature; Wordsworth saw into Nature, and
touched chords undreamed of by the gentle poet of rural scenes and
fireside pleasures. Cowper's simplicity of diction was in his day
almost daring; and he broke away from all the sentimental Arcadian
figures with which Thomson's landscapes were peopled. Therefore
his value lies in the note of sincerity that he sounded. Singularly
enough, he has been admired by French critics. He has been com-
pared to Rousseau, and Sainte-Beuve calls him "the bard of domestic
life. »
His fame as a serious poet rests chiefly on 'The Task,'
which Hazlitt calls "a poem which, with its pictures of domestic
comfort and social refinement, can hardly be forgotten but with the
language itself. "
His life is briefly told. He was born at Berkhampstead, England,
November 26th, 1731. Through his mother he was descended from
the family of the poet John Donne. She died when he was but six
years of age, and he was sent to school in Hertfordshire and to
Westminster. For three years he studied law at the Temple, but
although called to the bar in 1754, he never practiced.
As a young
man he had an attack of madness, attempted suicide, and was con-
fined at St. Albans for two years. When released he retired to
Huntington, where he formed a friendship with the Unwins. On the
death of Rev. William Unwin, he and Mrs. Unwin removed to Olney,
where most of Cowper's poems were written, and afterward to Wes-
ton, where Mrs. Unwin died in 1796. Cowper survived her four years,
dying on April 25th, 1800.
At Olney, Cowper lived in seclusion, amusing himself with his
garden and greenhouse, raising pineapples, mending windows, writing,
reading, and playing with his pets. The chief of them were his
three hares, Puss, Tiny, and Bess, which formed the topic of an
essay in the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1784. It is this simple
## p. 4108 (#486) ###########################################
4108
WILLIAM COWPER
parlor at Olney which Cowper describes in The Task,' where he
says:-
"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 evening in. "
In this retreat from the haunts of the worldly, whom he deemed
so trivial and sinful, the poet found happiness in watching the flicker-
ing fire and listening to the wild blasts of winter that swept the
panes with swirling snow. Here he sat in his easy-chair, while the
dog dozed at his feet, the hares gamboled, and the linnets twittered
until silenced by a quaint bit of music on the harpsichord. Cowper
would twine "silken thread round ivory reels," wind crewels, or
read aloud to his two devoted companions as they knitted, or
<< the well-depicted flower
Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn. "
The one, Mrs. Unwin, was somewhat prim and puritanical; the other,
Lady Austen, a handsome woman of the world, was gay and viva-
cious, and banished Cowper's dark moods by her grace and charm.
To dispel his morbid fancies she told him the old story of the
London citizen riding to Edmonton, which,
says Hazlitt,
perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as anything of
the same length that ever was written. »
<<< has
The
"Lady Austen," says his biographer Wright, "seeing his face
brighten, and delighted with her success, wound up the story with
all the skill at her command. Cowper could no longer control
himself, but burst out into a loud and hearty peal of laughter.
ladies joined in his mirth, and the merriment had scarcely subsided
by supper-time. The story made such an impression on his mind
that at night he could not sleep; and his thoughts having taken the
form of rhyme, he sprang from his bed and committed them to
paper, and in the morning brought down to Mrs. Unwin the crude
outline of John Gilpin. All that day and for several days he
secluded himself in the greenhouse, and went on with the task of
polishing and improving what he had written. As he filled his slips
of paper, he sent them across the market-place to Mr.
Wilson, to the
great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several
other occasions had been favored with the first sight of some of
Cowper's smaller poems. "
The portrait of John Gilpin was taken from John Beyer, a linen-
draper who lived at No. 3 Cheapside. John Gilpin' was
published
## p. 4109 (#487) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4109
anonymously in the Public Advertiser, and was received with
enthusiasm. Printed as a ballad, copies of it, with pictures of John
Gilpin flying past the "Bell" at Edmonton, were sold by hundreds;
but Cowper did not acknowledge the poem until 1785, when he
brought out The Task. '
This was also suggested by Lady Austen, who asked him to write
something in blank verse. Cowper replied that he lacked a subject.
"Subject—nonsense! " she said: "you can write on anything. Take
this sofa for a subject. " Following her command, the poet named
the first book of 'The Task' 'The Sofa. ' She suggested also the
verses on The Loss of the Royal George. '
At Weston Cowper appears to have enjoyed the society of the
county-side. His companions here were Puss, the last surviving
hare, and the Spaniel Beau, "a spotted liver-color and white, or
rather a chestnut" dog, the subject of several poems.
Cowper never married. His attachment to Theodora- the "Delia »
of his verses-the daughter of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, lasted
through his life, and her sister, Lady Hesketh, was one of his kind-
est and best friends. It was she who made for him those peculiar
muslin caps which he wears in his portraits. Many short poems
addressed to her attest his affection and gratitude for her friendship
and ministrations, and to Mrs. Unwin belong the verses and the
sonnet inscribed To Mary. '
Lives of Cowper are numerous. His old friend, John Newton,
attempted one immediately after his death, but this was not com-
pleted; and the first to appear was a life by Hayley (1803-6),
extended in the 'Life and Letters of Cowper,' by T. S. Grimshawe
(1835). There are also Cowper's own 'Memoirs' (a description of
his mental derangement and religious experiences), published in 1816;
'Life and Letters of Cowper' by Southey in 1835; and two books by
T. Wright, The Town of Cowper' (1886); and Life of Cowper'
(1892). An interesting biography has also been written by Goldwin
Smith, in the series of 'English Men of Letters,' in which he
says:-
-
"In all his social judgments Cowper is at a wrong point of view. He is
always deluded by the idol of his cave. He writes perpetually on the two-
fold assumption that a life of retirement is more favorable to virtue than a
life of action, and that God made the country and man made the town. '
His flight from the world was rendered necessary by his malady and
respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight and not a victory. His
misconception was fostered and partly produced by a religion which was
essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave birth to characters of the highest
and most energetic beneficence, represented salvation too little as the reward
of effort, too much as the reward of passion, belief, and of spiritual emotion. "
## p. 4110 (#488) ###########################################
4110
WILLIAM COWPER
Yet despite this gloom, Cowper possessed the humor which finds
admirable expression in many small poems, in 'John Gilpin' and in
his 'Letters. ' These are the real mirror of his life. Southey con-
siders his letters the most delightful in the language. They contain
nothing but the details of his daily life, and such happenings as the
flowering of pinks, the singing of birds in the apple-blossoms, the
falling of the dew on the grass under his window, the pranks of his
pets, the tricks of the Spaniel Beau, the frolics of the tortoise-shell
kitten, the flight of his favorite hare, and the excitements of a morn-
ing walk when the once nodding grass is "fledged with icy feathers. "
Their English is so easy and graceful, and their humor so spontane-
ous, that the reader feels a sense of friendship with the modest poet
of 'The Task,' who, despite his platitudes, wins a certain respectful
admiration.
THE CRICKET
ITTLE inmate, full of mirth,
on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.
Thus thy praise shall be expressed,
Inoffensive, welcome guest!
While the rat is on the scout,
And the mouse with curious snout,
With what vermin else infest
Every dish, and spoil the best;
Frisking thus before the fire,
Thou hast all thine heart's desire.
Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song-
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired and shrill and clear,
Melody throughout the year.
## p. 4111 (#489) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4111
THE WINTER WALK AT NOON
From The Task>
HE night was winter in his roughest mood;
THE The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon
Upon the southern side of the slant hills,
And where the woods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles, resigning all its rage,
And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue
Without a cloud, and white without a speck
The dazzling splendor of the scene below.
Again the harmony comes o'er the vale;
And through the trees I view the embattled tower
Whence all the music. I again perceive
The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
And settle in soft musings as I tread
The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.
The roof, though movable through all its length,
As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed;
And intercepting in their silent fall
The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.
No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.
The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes, and more than half suppressed:
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendent drops of ice
That tinkle in the withered leaves below.
Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And Learning wiser grow without his books.
Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which Wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared, and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
## p. 4112 (#490) ###########################################
4112
WILLIAM COWPER
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells,
By which the magic art of shrewder wits
Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.
Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgment, hoodwinked. Some the style
Infatuates, and through labyrinths and wilds
Of error leads them, by a tune entranced;
While sloth seduces them, too weak to bear
The insupportable fatigue of thought,
And swallowing therefore without pause or choice
The total grist unsifted, husks and all.
But trees and rivulets, whose rapid course
Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,
And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,
And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time
Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,
Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,-
Not shy, as in the world, and to be won
By slow solicitation,- seize at once
The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.
ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE
WRITTEN WHEN THE NEWS ARRIVED
OLL for the brave-
TOLL
The brave that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!
Eight hundred of the brave,
Whose courage well was tried,
Had made the vessel heel,
And laid her on her side.
A land breeze shook the shrouds,
And she was overset-
Down went the Royal George,
With all her crew complete.
-
Toll for the brave!
Brave Kempenfelt is gone;
His last sea fight is fought,
His work of glory done.
## p. 4113 (#491) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
VII-258
It was not in the battle;
No tempest gave the shock;
She sprang no fatal leak;
She ran upon a rock.
His sword was in its sheath;
His fingers held the pen,
When Kempenfelt went down
With twice four hundred men.
Weigh the vessel up,
Once dreaded by our foes!
And mingle with our cup
The tear that England owes.
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England's thunder,
And plow the distant main.
But Kempenfelt is gone-
His victories are o'er;
And he and his eight hundred
Shall plow the waves no more.
IMAGINARY VERSES OF ALEXANDER SELKIRK
DURING HIS SOLITARY ABODE ON JUAN FERNANDEZ
AM monarch of all I survey –
I
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.
I am out of humanity's reach;
I must finish my journey alone,
Never hear the sweet music of speech —
I start at the sound of my own.
The beasts that roam over the plain
My form with indifference see;
They are so unacquainted with man,
Their tameness is shocking to me.
4113
## p. 4114 (#492) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4114
Society, friendship, and love,
Divinely bestowed upon man!
O, had I the wings of a dove,
How soon would I taste you again!
My sorrows I then might assuage
In the ways of religion and truth-
Might learn from the wisdom of age,
And be cheered by the sallies of youth.
Religion! What treasure untold
Resides in that heavenly word! -
More precious than silver and gold,
Or all that this earth can afford;
But the sound of the church-going bell
These valleys and rocks never heard,
Never sighed at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled when the Sabbath appeared.
Ye winds that have made me your sport,
Convey to this desolate shore
Some cordial endearing report
Of a land I shall visit no more!
My friends- do they now and then send
A wish or a thought after me?
Oh tell me I yet have a friend,
Though a friend I am never to see.
How fleet is the glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-wingèd arrows of light.
When I think of my own native land,
In a moment I seem to be there;
But alas! recollection at hand
Soon hurries me back to despair.
But the sea-fowl has gone to her nest,
The beast is laid down in his lair;
Even here is a season of rest,
And I to my cabin repair.
There's mercy in every place,
And mercy-encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace,
And reconciles man to his lot.
EX
SO
## p. 4115 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
THE IMMUTABILITY OF HUMAN NATURE
From a Letter to William Unwin (1780)
4115
WHE
HEN we look back upon our forefathers, we seem to look
back upon the people of another nation; almost upon
creatures of another species. Their vast rambling man-
sions, spacious halls, and painted casements, the Gothic porch
smothered with honeysuckles, their little gardens and high walls,
their box-edgings, balls of holly, and yew-tree statues, are become
so entirely unfashionable now, that we can hardly believe it
possible that a people who resemble us so little in their taste
should resemble us in anything else. But in everything else, I
suppose, they were our counterparts exactly; and time, that has
sewed up a slashed sleeve and reduced the large trunk-hose to a
neat pair of silk stockings, has left human nature just where it
found it.
The inside of the man at least has undergone no change.
His passions, appetites, and aims are just what they ever were.
They wear perhaps a handsomer disguise than they did in the
days of yore, for philosophy and literature will have their effect
upon the exterior; but in every other respect a modern is only
an ancient in a different dress.
FROM A LETTER TO REV. JOHN NEWTON
OLNEY, NOVEMBER 30TH, 1783.
My dear Friend: -
-―
I
HAVE neither long visits to pay nor to receive, nor ladies to
spend hours in telling me that which might be told in five
minutes; yet often find myself obliged to be an economist of
time, and to make the most of a short opportunity. Let our
station be as retired as it may, there is no want of playthings
and avocations, nor much need to seek them, in this world of
ours. Business, or what presents itself to us under that impos-
ing character, will find us out even in the stillest retreat, and
plead its importance, however trivial in reality, as a just demand
upon our attention. It is wonderful how by means of such real
or seeming necessities my time is stolen away. I have just time
to observe that time is short, and by the time I have made the
observation, time is gone.
## p. 4116 (#494) ###########################################
4116
WILLIAM COWPER
I have wondered in former days at the patience of the ante-
diluvian world, that they could endure a life almost millenary,
and with so little variety as seems to have fallen to their share.
It is probable that they had much fewer employments than we.
Their affairs lay in a narrower compass; their libraries were in-
differently furnished; philosophical researches were carried on
with much less industry and acuteness of penetration, and fid-
dles perhaps were not even invented. How then could seven
or eight hundred years of life be supported? I have asked this
question formerly, and been at a loss to resolve it; but I think
I can answer it now. I will suppose myself born a thousand
years before Noah was born or thought of. I rise with the sun;
I worship; I prepare my breakfast; I swallow a bucket of goat's
milk and a dozen good sizable cakes. I fasten a new string to
my bow, and my youngest boy, a lad of about thirty years of
age, having played with my arrows till he has stripped off all
the feathers, I find myself obliged to repair them. The morning
is thus spent in preparing for the chase, and it is become neces-
sary that I should dine. I dig up my roots; I wash them; boil
them; I find them not done enough, I boil them again; my wife
is angry; we dispute; we settle the point; but in the mean time
the fire goes out, and must be kindled again.
All this is very
amusing.
I hunt; I bring home the prey; with the skin of it I mend
an old coat, or I make a new one. By this time the day is far
spent; I feel myself fatigued, and retire to rest. Thus, what
with tilling the ground and eating the fruit of it, hunting, and
walking, and running, and mending old clothes, and sleeping
and rising again, I can suppose an inhabitant of the primeval
world so much occupied as to sigh over the shortness of life,
and to find, at the end of many centuries, that they had all
slipped through his fingers and were passing away like a
shadow. What wonder then that I, who live in a day of so
much greater refinement, when there is so much more to be
wanted and wished, and to be enjoyed, should feel myself now
and then pinched in point of opportunity, and at some loss for
leisure to fill four sides of a sheet like this?
## p. 4117 (#495) ###########################################
4117
GEORGE CRABBE
(1754-1832)
EORGE CRABBE was born at Aldborough in Suffolk, the son of
a customs officer. He received a fair education for a vil-
lage lad, and at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to a
country surgeon. He early showed an inclination toward letters,
versifying much while a schoolboy. In 1778 he abandoned his pro-
fession of medicine, in which he was not successful, and came up to
London with a few pounds and some manuscript in his pocket,
determined to make his way in literature. He met with the usual
reverses of a beginner without reputation
or patronage, and soon was desperately in
need of money. He wrote many letters
to well-known people, without response.
In his extremity he applied to Burke,
who, although a stranger, received him
most kindly into his own house, gave him
advice and criticism, recommended him to
Dodsley the publisher, and introduced him
to many notable men of the day, among
them Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox.
During this time Crabbe wrote The
Library and the 'The Village'; and also
at the suggestion of his patron qualified
himself for the ministry. He took holy
orders in 1782, and became shortly after chaplain to the Duke of
Rutland. Subsequently he held a number of small livings, procured
for him by his friends. The last of these, the rectory of Trowbridge,
given him in 1813, he held until his death in 1832.
'The Village,' published in 1783, made the poet's reputation. His
next work, The Newspaper,' published two years later, was much
inferior. For twenty years thereafter he wrote and destroyed vast
quantities of manuscript. Not until 1809 did he publish again. 'The
Parish Register,' coming out in that year, was even more successful
than his first work. In 1810 appeared 'The Borough,' containing his
best work; 'Tales in Verse' following in 1812. With Tales of the
Hall,' appearing in 1819, he took leave of the public.
Crabbe is an important link in the transition period between the
poetry of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Men were
GEORGE CRABBE
## p. 4118 (#496) ###########################################
4118
GEORGE CRABBE
growing tired of the artificiality and the conventional frigidity
of the current verse in the hands of the imitators of Pope. A feel-
ing for change was in the air, manifested in the incipient romantic
movement and in what is called "the return to nature. " Gold-
smith was one of the first to lead the way back to simplicity, but
he enveloped in a tender, somewhat sentimental idealism whatever
he touched. Then came Thomson with his generalizations of nature,
Cowper, a more faithful painter of rural scenes, and Burns, who
sang of the thought and feeling of the common man. The work
of these poets was a reaction against the poetry of town life, too apt
to become artificial with its subject. Yet, being poets and singers,
they expressed not so much the reality as what lies behind — its
beauty and its tenderness. To give the right perspective to this
return to nature, there was needed a man who should paint life as it
is, in its naked realism, unveiled by the glamour of poetic vision.
Crabbe was this man. The most uncompromising realist, he led
poetry back to human life on its stern dark side. Born and bred
among the poor, he described, as no one else in the whole range of
English verse has done, the sordid existences among which he had
grown up. He dispelled all illusions about rural life, and dealt the
death-blow to the Corydons and Phillises of pastoral poetry. He
showed that the poor man can be more immoral and even more
unprincipled than the rich, because his higher spiritual nature is
hopelessly dwarfed in the desperate struggle to keep the wolf from
the door. He supplied harrowing texts to the social economist. He
is a gloomy poet, especially in the first part of his work, for he
paints principally the shadows that hang over the lives of the lowly;
he does not deal with that life imaginatively as Wordsworth and
Burns do, but realistically, narrating with photographic
what he saw. He excels in graphic delineations of external facts,
but is also a powerful painter of the passions, especially the more
violent ones, such as remorse and despair. Sir Eustace Grey' is a
masterful portrayal of madness.
Crabbe has at times been denied the name of poet. There is little
music in his verse, little of that singing quality that goes with all
true poetry. His versification is often slipshod and careless. His
lack of taste and artistic feeling shows itself not only in the manner
but also in the matter of his work. He dwells by preference on the
unlovely; he does not choose his details as an artist would. He is
too minute, too like those Dutch painters who bestow as much care
on the refuse as on the burnished platters of their interiors. And
again he is trivial or too literal. But the steady admiration his
poetry has excited in men of the most different tastes for several
generations shows that it has deeper qualities. The truth is, that his
## p. 4119 (#497) ###########################################
GEORGE CRABBE
4119
mean and squalid details are not mere heaps of unrelated things, nor
irrelevant to his story; they are not even mere "scenery. " They
are part of the history, in general the tragedy, of human hearts and
souls; and owe their validity as poetic material, and their power of
interesting us, to their being part of the influences that bear on the
history.
Scott had Crabbe's poems read aloud in his last illness. Horace
Smith called him "Pope in worsted stockings. " Jane Austen said
she "could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. " Cardinal Newman read the
'Tales of the Hall' with extreme delight on their first appearance,
and fifty years later still thought well of them. These different
opinions testify that whatever the shortcomings of Crabbe as crafts-
man, the earnestness and the genuineness of his work give him a
secure place among English poets.
NEX
ISAAC ASHFORD
From The Parish Register'
EXT to these ladies, but in naught allied,
A noble peasant, Isaac Ashford, died.
Noble he was, contemning all things mean,
His truth unquestioned and his soul serene:
Of no man's presence Isaac felt afraid;
At no man's question Isaac looked dismayed;
Shame knew he not; he dreaded no disgrace;
Truth, simple truth, was written in his face:
Yet while the serious thought his soul approved,
Cheerful he seemed, and gentleness he loved;
To bliss domestic he his heart resigned,
And with the firmest had the fondest mind.
Were others joyful, he looked smiling on,
And gave allowance where he needed none;
Good he refused with future ill to buy,
Nor knew a joy that caused reflection's sigh;
A friend to virtue, his unclouded breast
No envy stung, no jealousy distressed;
(Bane of the poor! it wounds their weaker mind
To miss one favor which their neighbors find. )
Yet far was he from stoic pride removed;
He felt humanely, and he warmly loved.
I marked his action when his infant died,
And his old neighbor for offense was tried:
## p. 4120 (#498) ###########################################
4120
GEORGE CRABBE
The still tears, stealing down that furrowed cheek,
Spoke pity plainer than the tongue can speak.
If pride were his, 'twas not their vulgar pride
Who in their base contempt the great deride;
Nor pride in learning: though my Clerk agreed,
If fate should call him, Ashford might succeed;
Nor pride in rustic skill, although we knew
None his superior, and his equals few:
But if that spirit in his soul had place,
It was the jealous pride that shuns disgrace;
A pride in honest fame, by virtue gained,
In sturdy boys to virtuous labors trained:
Pride in the power that guards his country's coast,
And all that Englishmen enjoy and boast;
Pride in a life that slander's tongue defied
In fact a noble passion, misnamed Pride.
He had no party's rage, no sectary's whim;
Christian and countryman was all with him:
True to his church he came; no Sunday shower
Kept him at home in that important hour;
Nor his firm feet could one persuading sect
By the strong glare of their new light direct;
"On hope in mine own sober light I gaze,
But should be blind and lose it, in your blaze. "
-
In times severe, when many a sturdy swain
Felt it his pride, his comfort, to complain,
Isaac their wants would soothe, his own would hide,
And feel in that his comfort and his pride.
I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,
And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there:
I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honored head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight,
Compelled to kneel and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers, all in dread the while,
Till Mr. Ashford softened to a smile:
No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer,
Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there;-
But he is blest, and I lament no more
A wise, good man, contented to be poor.
## p. 4121 (#499) ###########################################
GEORGE CRABBE
4121
THE PARISH WORKHOUSE AND APOTHECARY
From The Village›
TH
HEIRS is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents who know no children's love dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and-far the happiest they! —
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride embitters what it can't deny.
Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure:
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?
only in relation to the subject of these precedent discourses, and
shall be likelier thereby to fall into the contempt than rise up to
the estimation of most people.
As far as my memory can return back into my past life,
before I knew, or was capable of guessing, what the world or
the glories or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul
gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants
are said to turn away from others by an antipathy imperceptible
## p. 4096 (#470) ###########################################
4096
ABRAHAM COWLEY
to themselves and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even
when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running
about on holy-days and playing with my fellows, I was wont to
steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a
book, or with some one companion if I could find any of the
same temper. I was then too so much an enemy to all con-
straint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any per-
suasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common
rules of grammar; in which they dispensed with me alone,
because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercise out
of my own reading and observation. That I was then of the
same mind as I am now (which I confess I wonder at, myself)
may appear by the latter end of an ode which I made when I
was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed with
many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish; but of this
part, which I here set down (if a very little were corrected), I
should hardly now be much ashamed.
THIS only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honor I would have,
Not from great deeds, but good alone;
The unknown are better, than ill known:
Rumor can ope the grave.
Acquaintance I would have, but when't depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.
Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night.
My house a cottage more
Than palace; and should fitting be
For all my use, no luxury.
My garden painted o'er
With nature's hand, not art's; and pleasures yield,
Horace might envy in his Sabin field.
Thus would I double my life's fading space;
For he that runs it well, twice runs his race.
And in this true delight,
These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear, nor wish, my fate;
But boldly say each night,
"To-morrow let my sun his beams display,
Or in clouds hide them; I have lived to-day. "
I
## p. 4097 (#471) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4097
You may see by it, I was even then acquainted with the
poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace); and perhaps
it was the immature and immoderate love of them, which stampt
first, or rather engraved, these characters in me: they were like
letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which with the tree
still grow proportionably. But how this love came to be pro-
duced in me so early, is a hard question: I believe I can tell
the particular little chance that filled my head first with such
chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there: for I
remember, when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in
it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlor (I know not by
what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book
but of devotion), - but there was wont to lie Spenser's works:
this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with
the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave
houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understand-
ing had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tink-
ling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers; so that I think I
had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was
thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.
With these affections of mind, and my heart wholly set upon
letters, I went to the university; but was soon torn from thence
by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to
stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the
princely cedars to me the hyssop. Yet I had as good fortune as
could have befallen me in such a tempest; for I was cast by it
into the family of one of the best persons, and into the court of
one of the best princesses, of the world. Now, though I was
here engaged in ways most contrary to the original design of
my life,— that is, into much company, and no small business,
and into a daily sight of greatness, both militant and triumphant
(for that was the state then of the English and French courts),
yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only
added the confirmation of reason to that which was before but
natural inclination. I saw plainly all the paint of that kind.
of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty which I did not
fall in love with when for aught I knew it was real, was not
like to bewitch or entice me when I saw that it was adulterate.
I met with several great persons, whom I liked very well; but
could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be
liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be
VII-257
## p. 4098 (#472) ###########################################
4098
ABRAHAM COWLEY
in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and
bravely in it: a storm would not agree with my stomach, if it
did with my courage. Though I was in a crowd of as good
company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business
of great and honorable trust, though I ate at the best table, and
enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought
to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and pub-
lic distresses; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old
school-boy's wish, in a copy of verses to the same effect:—
"Well then, I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree," etc.
And I never then proposed to myself any other advantage
from his Majesty's happy Restoration, but the getting into some.
moderately convenient retreat in the country; which I thought,
in that case, I might easily have compassed as well as some
others, who with no greater probabilities or pretenses have
arrived to extraordinary fortune: but I had before written a
shrewd prophecy against myself, and I think Apollo inspired me
in the truth though not in the elegance of it:—
"THOU neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar.
Content thyself with the small barren praise
Which neglected verse does raise. "
She spake; and all my years to come
Took their unlucky doom.
Their several ways of life let others chuse,
Their several pleasures let them use;
But I was born for Love and for a Muse.
With Fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so must end.
The star that did my being frame
Was but a lambent flame,
And some small light it did dispense,
But neither heat nor influence.
No matter, Cowley; let proud Fortune see
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee.
Let all her gifts the portion be
Of folly, lust, and flattery,
Fraud, extortion, calumny,
## p. 4099 (#473) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Murder, infidelity,
Rebellion and hypocrisy.
Do thou nor grieve nor blush to be,
As all th' inspired tuneful men,
And all thy great forefathers were, from Homer down to Ben.
However, by the failing of the forces which I had expected,
I did not quit the design which I had resolved on; I cast myself
into it à corps perdu, without making capitulations, or taking
counsel of fortune. But God laughs at a man who says to his
soul, "Take thy ease. " I met presently not only with many
little incumbrances and impediments, but with so much sickness
(a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness
of an emperor as well as mine; yet I do neither repent nor alter
my course. "Non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum;" nothing
shall separate me from a mistress which I have loved so long
and have now at last married; though she neither has brought
me a rich portion, nor lived yet so quietly with me as I hoped
from her:
"Nec vos, dulcissima mundi
Nomina, vos Musæ, Libertas, Otia, Libri,
Hortique Sylvæque, anima remanente, relinquam,»
(Nor by me e'er shall you,
You, of all names the sweetest and the best,
You, Muses, books, and liberty, and rest;
You, gardens, fields, and woods, forsaken be,
As long as life itself forsakes not me. )
4099
But this is a very pretty ejaculation; because I have concluded
all the other chapters with a copy of verses, I will maintain the
humor to the last.
ON THE DEATH OF CRASHAW
OET and Saint! to thee alone are given
POR
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven;
The hard and rarest union which can be,
Next that of Godhead with humanity.
Long did the Muses banished slaves abide,
And build vain pyramids to mortal pride;
Like Moses, thou (though spells and charms withstand)
Hast brought them nobly home back to their holy land.
## p. 4100 (#474) ###########################################
4100
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Ah, wretched we, poets of earth! but thou
Wert, living, the same poet which thou'rt now;
Whilst angels sing to thee their airs divine,
And joy in an applause so great as thine.
Equal society with them to hold,
Thou need'st not make new songs, but say the old;
And they, kind spirits! shall all rejoice, to see
How little less than they exalted man may be.
Still the old heathen gods in numbers dwell;
The heavenliest thing on earth still keeps up hell;
Nor have we yet quite purged the Christian land;
Still idols here, like calves at Bethel, stand.
And though Pan's death long since all oracles broke,
Yet still in rhyme the fiend Apollo spoke:
Nay, with the worst of heathen dotage, we
Vain men! the monster woman deify;
Find stars, and tie our fates there in a face,
And paradise in them, by whom we lost it, place.
What different faults corrupt our Muses thus?
Wanton as girls, as old wives fabulous!
Thy spotless Muse, like Mary, did contain
The boundless Godhead; she did well disdain
That her eternal verse employed should be
On a less subject than eternity;
And for a sacred mistress scorned to take
But her, whom God himself scorned not his spouse to make.
It (in a kind) her miracle did do;
A fruitful mother was, and virgin too.
How well, blest swan, did Fate contrive thy death,
And make thee render up thy tuneful breath
In thy great mistress's arms, thou most divine
And richest offering of Loretto's shrine!
Where, like some holy sacrifice t' expire,
A fever burns thee, and Love lights the fire.
Angels, they say, brought the famed Chapel there,
And bore the sacred load in triumph through the air:
'Tis surer much they brought thee there; and they,
And thou their charge, went singing all the way.
Pardon, my Mother-Church, if I consent
That angels led him when from thee he went;
For ev'n in error seen no danger is,
When joined with so much piety as his.
## p. 4101 (#475) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Ah, mighty God! with shame I speak't, and grief;
Ah, that our greatest faults were in belief!
And our weak reason were ev'n weaker yet,
Rather than thus our wills too strong for it.
His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right;
And I myself a Catholic will be,
So far at least, great Saint, to pray to thee.
Hail, bard triumphant, and some care bestow
On us, the poets militant below!
Oppressed by our old enemy, adverse chance,
Attacked by envy and by ignorance;
Enchained by beauty, tortured by desires,
Exposed by tyrant Love to savage beasts and fires.
Thou from low earth in nobler flames didst rise,
And like Elijah, mount alive the skies.
Elisha-like, but with a wish much less,
More fit thy greatness and my littleness,
Lo! here I beg - I, whom thou once didst prove
So humble to esteem, so good to love -
Not that thy spirit might on me doubled be,
I ask but half thy mighty spirit for me:
And when my muse soars with so strong a wing,
'Twill learn of things divine, and first of thee, to sing.
ON THE DEATH OF MR. WILLIAM HERVEY
T WAS a dismal and a fearful night;
Scarce could the moon disk on th' unwilling light,
When sleep, death's image, left my troubled breast,
By something liker death possest.
My eyes with tears did uncommanded flow,
And on my soul hung the dull weight
Of some intolerable fate.
What bell was that? ah me! too much I know.
My sweet companion and my gentle peer,
Why hast thou left me thus unkindly here,
Thy end forever, and my life to moan?
Oh, thou hast left me all alone!
Thy soul and body, where death's agony
Besieged around thy noble heart,
Did not with more reluctance part,
Than I, my dearest friend, do part from thee.
4101
## p. 4102 (#476) ###########################################
4102
ABRAHAM COWLEY
My dearest friend, would I had died for thee!
Life and this world henceforth will tedious be;
Nor shall I know hereafter what to do,
If once my griefs prove tedious too.
Silent and sad I walk about all day,
As sullen ghosts stalk speechless by,
Where their hid treasures lie;
Alas! my treasure's gone! why do I stay?
He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
A strong and mighty influence joined our birth:
Nor did we envy the most sounding name
By friendship given of old to fame.
None but his brethren he and sisters knew,
Whom the kind youth preferred to me;
And ev'n in that we did agree,
For much above myself I loved them too.
Say for you saw us, ye immortal lights-
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
Till the Ledæan stars, so famed for love,
Wondered at us from above!
We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine;
But search of deep philosophy,
—
Wit, eloquence and poetry;
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.
Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say
Have ye not seen us walking every day?
Was there a tree about which did not know
The love betwixt us two?
Henceforth, ye gentle trees, forever fade;
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into darksome shades combine,
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid!
Henceforth, no learned youths beneath you sing,
Till all the tuneful birds to your boughs they bring;
No tuneful birds play with their wonted cheer,
And call the learned youths to hear;
No whistling winds through the glad branches fly:
But all, with sad solemnity,
Mute and unmovèd be,
Mute as the grave wherein my friend does lie.
To him my muse made haste with every strain,
Whilst it was new and warm yet from the brain:
## p. 4103 (#477) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4103
He loved my worthless rhymes, and like a friend,
Would find out something to commend.
Hence now, my Muse! thou canst not me delight:
Be this my latest verse,
With which I now adorn his hearse;
And this my grief, without thy help, shall write.
Had I a wreath of bays about my brow,
I should contemn that flourishing honor now,
Condemn it to the fire, and joy to hear
It rage and crackle there.
Instead of bays, crown with sad cypress me;
Cypress, which tombs does beautify;
Not Phoebus grieved so much as I,
For him who first was near that mournful tree.
Large was his soul, as large a soul as e'er
Submitted to inform a body here;
High as the place 'twas shortly in heaven to have,
But low and humble as his grave:
So high, that all the Virtues there did come,
As to their chiefest seat,
Conspicuous and great;
So low, that for me too it made. a room.
He scorned this busy world below, and all
That we, mistaken mortals! pleasure call;
Was filled with innocent gallantry and truth,
Triumphant o'er the sins of youth.
He like the stars, to which he now is gone,
That shine with beams like flame,
Yet burn not with the same,
Had all the light of youth, of the fire none.
Knowledge he only sought, and so soon caught,
As if for him knowledge had rather sought:
Nor did more learning ever crowded lie
In such a short mortality.
Whene'er the skillful youth discoursed or writ,
Still did the nations throng
About his eloquent tongue;
Nor could his ink flow faster than his wit.
So strong a wit did nature to him frame,
As all things but his judgment overcame:
## p. 4104 (#478) ###########################################
4104
ABRAHAM COWLEY
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below;
Oh! had he lived in learning's world, what bound
Would have been able to control
His overpowering soul!
We've lost in him arts that not yet are found.
His mirth was the pure spirits of various wit,
Yet never did his God or friends forget;
And when deep talk and wisdom came in view,
Retired, and gave to them their due:
For the rich help of books he always took,
Though his own searching mind before
Was so with notions written o'er,
As if wise nature had made that her book.
So many virtues joined in him, as we
Can scarce pick here and there in history;
More than old writers' practice e'er could reach;
As much as they could ever teach.
These did Religion, queen of virtues, sway;
And all their sacred motions steer,
Just like the first and highest sphere,
Which wheels about, and turns all heaven one way.
With as much zeal, devotion, piety,
He always lived, as other saints do die.
Still with his soul severe account he kept,
Wiping all debts out ere he slept:
Then down in peace and innocence he lay,
Like the sun's laborious light,
Which still in water sets at night,
Unsullied with his journey of the day.
Wondrous young man! why wert thou made so good,
To be snatched hence ere better understood?
Snatched before half of thee enough was seen!
Thou ripe, and yet thy life but green!
Nor could thy friends take their last sad farewell;
But danger and infectious death
Maliciously seized on that breath
Where life, spirit, pleasure, always used to dwell.
But happy thou, ta'en from this frantic age,
Where ignorance and hypocrisy does rage!
## p. 4105 (#479) ###########################################
ABRAHAM COWLEY
4105
A fitter time for heaven no soul e'er chose,
The place now only free from those.
There 'mong the blest thou dost forever shine,
And wheresoe'er thou cast thy view
Upon that white and radiant crew,
Seest not a soul clothed with more light than thine.
And if the glorious saints cease not to know
Their wretched friends who fight with life below,
Thy flame to me does still the same abide,
Only more pure and rarefied.
There, whilst immortal hymns thou dost rehearse,
Thou dost with holy pity see
Our dull and earthly poesy,
Where grief and misery can be joined with verse.
A
A SUPPLICATION
WAKE, awake, my Lyre!
And tell thy silent master's humble tale
In sounds that may prevail;
Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire
Though so exalted she,
And I so lowly be,
Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.
Hark! how the strings awake;
And though the moving hand approach not near,
Themselves with awful fear
A kind of numerous trembling make.
Now all thy forces try,
Now all thy charms apply;
Revenge upon her ear the conquests of her eye.
Weak Lyre! thy virtue sure
Is useless here, since thou art only found
To cure, but not to wound,
And she to wound, but not to cure.
Too weak, too, wilt thou prove
My passion to remove;
Physic to other ills, thou'rt nourishment to love.
Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre!
For thou canst never tell my humble tale
In sounds that will prevail,
## p. 4106 (#480) ###########################################
4106
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Nor gentle thoughts in her inspire;
All thy vain mirth lay by;
Bid thy strings silent lie;
Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre, and let thy master die.
EPITAPH ON A LIVING AUTHOR
ERE, passenger, beneath this shed,
Lies Cowley, though entombed, not dead;
Yet freed from human toil and strife,
And all th' impertinence of life.
H
Who in his poverty is neat,
And even in retirement great,
With Gold, the people's idol, he
Holds endless war and enmity.
Can you not say, he has resigned
His breath, to this small cell confined?
With this small mansion let him have
The rest and silence of the grave:
Strew roses here as on his hearse,
And reckon this his funeral verse;
With wreaths of fragrant herbs adorn
The yet surviving poet's urn.
## p. 4106 (#481) ###########################################
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WILLIAM COWPER
## p. 4107 (#485) ###########################################
4107
WILLIAM COWPER
(1731-1800)
HE poet Cowper, who stands in the gap that separates Pope
from Wordsworth, belongs to the group that includes Thom-
son, Young, Goldsmith, and Crabbe. If he is unimportant
to-day in comparison with his importance to his own time, yet his
service to English poetry is great, for he dispersed the artificial
atmosphere which Pope had thrown around it. His moods and his
keys were alike limited, and he was soon overshadowed by Words-
worth. Cowper saw Nature; Wordsworth saw into Nature, and
touched chords undreamed of by the gentle poet of rural scenes and
fireside pleasures. Cowper's simplicity of diction was in his day
almost daring; and he broke away from all the sentimental Arcadian
figures with which Thomson's landscapes were peopled. Therefore
his value lies in the note of sincerity that he sounded. Singularly
enough, he has been admired by French critics. He has been com-
pared to Rousseau, and Sainte-Beuve calls him "the bard of domestic
life. »
His fame as a serious poet rests chiefly on 'The Task,'
which Hazlitt calls "a poem which, with its pictures of domestic
comfort and social refinement, can hardly be forgotten but with the
language itself. "
His life is briefly told. He was born at Berkhampstead, England,
November 26th, 1731. Through his mother he was descended from
the family of the poet John Donne. She died when he was but six
years of age, and he was sent to school in Hertfordshire and to
Westminster. For three years he studied law at the Temple, but
although called to the bar in 1754, he never practiced.
As a young
man he had an attack of madness, attempted suicide, and was con-
fined at St. Albans for two years. When released he retired to
Huntington, where he formed a friendship with the Unwins. On the
death of Rev. William Unwin, he and Mrs. Unwin removed to Olney,
where most of Cowper's poems were written, and afterward to Wes-
ton, where Mrs. Unwin died in 1796. Cowper survived her four years,
dying on April 25th, 1800.
At Olney, Cowper lived in seclusion, amusing himself with his
garden and greenhouse, raising pineapples, mending windows, writing,
reading, and playing with his pets. The chief of them were his
three hares, Puss, Tiny, and Bess, which formed the topic of an
essay in the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1784. It is this simple
## p. 4108 (#486) ###########################################
4108
WILLIAM COWPER
parlor at Olney which Cowper describes in The Task,' where he
says:-
"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 evening in. "
In this retreat from the haunts of the worldly, whom he deemed
so trivial and sinful, the poet found happiness in watching the flicker-
ing fire and listening to the wild blasts of winter that swept the
panes with swirling snow. Here he sat in his easy-chair, while the
dog dozed at his feet, the hares gamboled, and the linnets twittered
until silenced by a quaint bit of music on the harpsichord. Cowper
would twine "silken thread round ivory reels," wind crewels, or
read aloud to his two devoted companions as they knitted, or
<< the well-depicted flower
Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn. "
The one, Mrs. Unwin, was somewhat prim and puritanical; the other,
Lady Austen, a handsome woman of the world, was gay and viva-
cious, and banished Cowper's dark moods by her grace and charm.
To dispel his morbid fancies she told him the old story of the
London citizen riding to Edmonton, which,
says Hazlitt,
perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as anything of
the same length that ever was written. »
<<< has
The
"Lady Austen," says his biographer Wright, "seeing his face
brighten, and delighted with her success, wound up the story with
all the skill at her command. Cowper could no longer control
himself, but burst out into a loud and hearty peal of laughter.
ladies joined in his mirth, and the merriment had scarcely subsided
by supper-time. The story made such an impression on his mind
that at night he could not sleep; and his thoughts having taken the
form of rhyme, he sprang from his bed and committed them to
paper, and in the morning brought down to Mrs. Unwin the crude
outline of John Gilpin. All that day and for several days he
secluded himself in the greenhouse, and went on with the task of
polishing and improving what he had written. As he filled his slips
of paper, he sent them across the market-place to Mr.
Wilson, to the
great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several
other occasions had been favored with the first sight of some of
Cowper's smaller poems. "
The portrait of John Gilpin was taken from John Beyer, a linen-
draper who lived at No. 3 Cheapside. John Gilpin' was
published
## p. 4109 (#487) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4109
anonymously in the Public Advertiser, and was received with
enthusiasm. Printed as a ballad, copies of it, with pictures of John
Gilpin flying past the "Bell" at Edmonton, were sold by hundreds;
but Cowper did not acknowledge the poem until 1785, when he
brought out The Task. '
This was also suggested by Lady Austen, who asked him to write
something in blank verse. Cowper replied that he lacked a subject.
"Subject—nonsense! " she said: "you can write on anything. Take
this sofa for a subject. " Following her command, the poet named
the first book of 'The Task' 'The Sofa. ' She suggested also the
verses on The Loss of the Royal George. '
At Weston Cowper appears to have enjoyed the society of the
county-side. His companions here were Puss, the last surviving
hare, and the Spaniel Beau, "a spotted liver-color and white, or
rather a chestnut" dog, the subject of several poems.
Cowper never married. His attachment to Theodora- the "Delia »
of his verses-the daughter of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, lasted
through his life, and her sister, Lady Hesketh, was one of his kind-
est and best friends. It was she who made for him those peculiar
muslin caps which he wears in his portraits. Many short poems
addressed to her attest his affection and gratitude for her friendship
and ministrations, and to Mrs. Unwin belong the verses and the
sonnet inscribed To Mary. '
Lives of Cowper are numerous. His old friend, John Newton,
attempted one immediately after his death, but this was not com-
pleted; and the first to appear was a life by Hayley (1803-6),
extended in the 'Life and Letters of Cowper,' by T. S. Grimshawe
(1835). There are also Cowper's own 'Memoirs' (a description of
his mental derangement and religious experiences), published in 1816;
'Life and Letters of Cowper' by Southey in 1835; and two books by
T. Wright, The Town of Cowper' (1886); and Life of Cowper'
(1892). An interesting biography has also been written by Goldwin
Smith, in the series of 'English Men of Letters,' in which he
says:-
-
"In all his social judgments Cowper is at a wrong point of view. He is
always deluded by the idol of his cave. He writes perpetually on the two-
fold assumption that a life of retirement is more favorable to virtue than a
life of action, and that God made the country and man made the town. '
His flight from the world was rendered necessary by his malady and
respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight and not a victory. His
misconception was fostered and partly produced by a religion which was
essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave birth to characters of the highest
and most energetic beneficence, represented salvation too little as the reward
of effort, too much as the reward of passion, belief, and of spiritual emotion. "
## p. 4110 (#488) ###########################################
4110
WILLIAM COWPER
Yet despite this gloom, Cowper possessed the humor which finds
admirable expression in many small poems, in 'John Gilpin' and in
his 'Letters. ' These are the real mirror of his life. Southey con-
siders his letters the most delightful in the language. They contain
nothing but the details of his daily life, and such happenings as the
flowering of pinks, the singing of birds in the apple-blossoms, the
falling of the dew on the grass under his window, the pranks of his
pets, the tricks of the Spaniel Beau, the frolics of the tortoise-shell
kitten, the flight of his favorite hare, and the excitements of a morn-
ing walk when the once nodding grass is "fledged with icy feathers. "
Their English is so easy and graceful, and their humor so spontane-
ous, that the reader feels a sense of friendship with the modest poet
of 'The Task,' who, despite his platitudes, wins a certain respectful
admiration.
THE CRICKET
ITTLE inmate, full of mirth,
on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.
Thus thy praise shall be expressed,
Inoffensive, welcome guest!
While the rat is on the scout,
And the mouse with curious snout,
With what vermin else infest
Every dish, and spoil the best;
Frisking thus before the fire,
Thou hast all thine heart's desire.
Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song-
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired and shrill and clear,
Melody throughout the year.
## p. 4111 (#489) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4111
THE WINTER WALK AT NOON
From The Task>
HE night was winter in his roughest mood;
THE The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon
Upon the southern side of the slant hills,
And where the woods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles, resigning all its rage,
And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue
Without a cloud, and white without a speck
The dazzling splendor of the scene below.
Again the harmony comes o'er the vale;
And through the trees I view the embattled tower
Whence all the music. I again perceive
The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
And settle in soft musings as I tread
The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.
The roof, though movable through all its length,
As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed;
And intercepting in their silent fall
The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.
No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.
The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes, and more than half suppressed:
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendent drops of ice
That tinkle in the withered leaves below.
Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And Learning wiser grow without his books.
Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which Wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared, and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
## p. 4112 (#490) ###########################################
4112
WILLIAM COWPER
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells,
By which the magic art of shrewder wits
Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.
Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgment, hoodwinked. Some the style
Infatuates, and through labyrinths and wilds
Of error leads them, by a tune entranced;
While sloth seduces them, too weak to bear
The insupportable fatigue of thought,
And swallowing therefore without pause or choice
The total grist unsifted, husks and all.
But trees and rivulets, whose rapid course
Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,
And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,
And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time
Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,
Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,-
Not shy, as in the world, and to be won
By slow solicitation,- seize at once
The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.
ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE
WRITTEN WHEN THE NEWS ARRIVED
OLL for the brave-
TOLL
The brave that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!
Eight hundred of the brave,
Whose courage well was tried,
Had made the vessel heel,
And laid her on her side.
A land breeze shook the shrouds,
And she was overset-
Down went the Royal George,
With all her crew complete.
-
Toll for the brave!
Brave Kempenfelt is gone;
His last sea fight is fought,
His work of glory done.
## p. 4113 (#491) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
VII-258
It was not in the battle;
No tempest gave the shock;
She sprang no fatal leak;
She ran upon a rock.
His sword was in its sheath;
His fingers held the pen,
When Kempenfelt went down
With twice four hundred men.
Weigh the vessel up,
Once dreaded by our foes!
And mingle with our cup
The tear that England owes.
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England's thunder,
And plow the distant main.
But Kempenfelt is gone-
His victories are o'er;
And he and his eight hundred
Shall plow the waves no more.
IMAGINARY VERSES OF ALEXANDER SELKIRK
DURING HIS SOLITARY ABODE ON JUAN FERNANDEZ
AM monarch of all I survey –
I
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.
I am out of humanity's reach;
I must finish my journey alone,
Never hear the sweet music of speech —
I start at the sound of my own.
The beasts that roam over the plain
My form with indifference see;
They are so unacquainted with man,
Their tameness is shocking to me.
4113
## p. 4114 (#492) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
4114
Society, friendship, and love,
Divinely bestowed upon man!
O, had I the wings of a dove,
How soon would I taste you again!
My sorrows I then might assuage
In the ways of religion and truth-
Might learn from the wisdom of age,
And be cheered by the sallies of youth.
Religion! What treasure untold
Resides in that heavenly word! -
More precious than silver and gold,
Or all that this earth can afford;
But the sound of the church-going bell
These valleys and rocks never heard,
Never sighed at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled when the Sabbath appeared.
Ye winds that have made me your sport,
Convey to this desolate shore
Some cordial endearing report
Of a land I shall visit no more!
My friends- do they now and then send
A wish or a thought after me?
Oh tell me I yet have a friend,
Though a friend I am never to see.
How fleet is the glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-wingèd arrows of light.
When I think of my own native land,
In a moment I seem to be there;
But alas! recollection at hand
Soon hurries me back to despair.
But the sea-fowl has gone to her nest,
The beast is laid down in his lair;
Even here is a season of rest,
And I to my cabin repair.
There's mercy in every place,
And mercy-encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace,
And reconciles man to his lot.
EX
SO
## p. 4115 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM COWPER
THE IMMUTABILITY OF HUMAN NATURE
From a Letter to William Unwin (1780)
4115
WHE
HEN we look back upon our forefathers, we seem to look
back upon the people of another nation; almost upon
creatures of another species. Their vast rambling man-
sions, spacious halls, and painted casements, the Gothic porch
smothered with honeysuckles, their little gardens and high walls,
their box-edgings, balls of holly, and yew-tree statues, are become
so entirely unfashionable now, that we can hardly believe it
possible that a people who resemble us so little in their taste
should resemble us in anything else. But in everything else, I
suppose, they were our counterparts exactly; and time, that has
sewed up a slashed sleeve and reduced the large trunk-hose to a
neat pair of silk stockings, has left human nature just where it
found it.
The inside of the man at least has undergone no change.
His passions, appetites, and aims are just what they ever were.
They wear perhaps a handsomer disguise than they did in the
days of yore, for philosophy and literature will have their effect
upon the exterior; but in every other respect a modern is only
an ancient in a different dress.
FROM A LETTER TO REV. JOHN NEWTON
OLNEY, NOVEMBER 30TH, 1783.
My dear Friend: -
-―
I
HAVE neither long visits to pay nor to receive, nor ladies to
spend hours in telling me that which might be told in five
minutes; yet often find myself obliged to be an economist of
time, and to make the most of a short opportunity. Let our
station be as retired as it may, there is no want of playthings
and avocations, nor much need to seek them, in this world of
ours. Business, or what presents itself to us under that impos-
ing character, will find us out even in the stillest retreat, and
plead its importance, however trivial in reality, as a just demand
upon our attention. It is wonderful how by means of such real
or seeming necessities my time is stolen away. I have just time
to observe that time is short, and by the time I have made the
observation, time is gone.
## p. 4116 (#494) ###########################################
4116
WILLIAM COWPER
I have wondered in former days at the patience of the ante-
diluvian world, that they could endure a life almost millenary,
and with so little variety as seems to have fallen to their share.
It is probable that they had much fewer employments than we.
Their affairs lay in a narrower compass; their libraries were in-
differently furnished; philosophical researches were carried on
with much less industry and acuteness of penetration, and fid-
dles perhaps were not even invented. How then could seven
or eight hundred years of life be supported? I have asked this
question formerly, and been at a loss to resolve it; but I think
I can answer it now. I will suppose myself born a thousand
years before Noah was born or thought of. I rise with the sun;
I worship; I prepare my breakfast; I swallow a bucket of goat's
milk and a dozen good sizable cakes. I fasten a new string to
my bow, and my youngest boy, a lad of about thirty years of
age, having played with my arrows till he has stripped off all
the feathers, I find myself obliged to repair them. The morning
is thus spent in preparing for the chase, and it is become neces-
sary that I should dine. I dig up my roots; I wash them; boil
them; I find them not done enough, I boil them again; my wife
is angry; we dispute; we settle the point; but in the mean time
the fire goes out, and must be kindled again.
All this is very
amusing.
I hunt; I bring home the prey; with the skin of it I mend
an old coat, or I make a new one. By this time the day is far
spent; I feel myself fatigued, and retire to rest. Thus, what
with tilling the ground and eating the fruit of it, hunting, and
walking, and running, and mending old clothes, and sleeping
and rising again, I can suppose an inhabitant of the primeval
world so much occupied as to sigh over the shortness of life,
and to find, at the end of many centuries, that they had all
slipped through his fingers and were passing away like a
shadow. What wonder then that I, who live in a day of so
much greater refinement, when there is so much more to be
wanted and wished, and to be enjoyed, should feel myself now
and then pinched in point of opportunity, and at some loss for
leisure to fill four sides of a sheet like this?
## p. 4117 (#495) ###########################################
4117
GEORGE CRABBE
(1754-1832)
EORGE CRABBE was born at Aldborough in Suffolk, the son of
a customs officer. He received a fair education for a vil-
lage lad, and at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to a
country surgeon. He early showed an inclination toward letters,
versifying much while a schoolboy. In 1778 he abandoned his pro-
fession of medicine, in which he was not successful, and came up to
London with a few pounds and some manuscript in his pocket,
determined to make his way in literature. He met with the usual
reverses of a beginner without reputation
or patronage, and soon was desperately in
need of money. He wrote many letters
to well-known people, without response.
In his extremity he applied to Burke,
who, although a stranger, received him
most kindly into his own house, gave him
advice and criticism, recommended him to
Dodsley the publisher, and introduced him
to many notable men of the day, among
them Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox.
During this time Crabbe wrote The
Library and the 'The Village'; and also
at the suggestion of his patron qualified
himself for the ministry. He took holy
orders in 1782, and became shortly after chaplain to the Duke of
Rutland. Subsequently he held a number of small livings, procured
for him by his friends. The last of these, the rectory of Trowbridge,
given him in 1813, he held until his death in 1832.
'The Village,' published in 1783, made the poet's reputation. His
next work, The Newspaper,' published two years later, was much
inferior. For twenty years thereafter he wrote and destroyed vast
quantities of manuscript. Not until 1809 did he publish again. 'The
Parish Register,' coming out in that year, was even more successful
than his first work. In 1810 appeared 'The Borough,' containing his
best work; 'Tales in Verse' following in 1812. With Tales of the
Hall,' appearing in 1819, he took leave of the public.
Crabbe is an important link in the transition period between the
poetry of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Men were
GEORGE CRABBE
## p. 4118 (#496) ###########################################
4118
GEORGE CRABBE
growing tired of the artificiality and the conventional frigidity
of the current verse in the hands of the imitators of Pope. A feel-
ing for change was in the air, manifested in the incipient romantic
movement and in what is called "the return to nature. " Gold-
smith was one of the first to lead the way back to simplicity, but
he enveloped in a tender, somewhat sentimental idealism whatever
he touched. Then came Thomson with his generalizations of nature,
Cowper, a more faithful painter of rural scenes, and Burns, who
sang of the thought and feeling of the common man. The work
of these poets was a reaction against the poetry of town life, too apt
to become artificial with its subject. Yet, being poets and singers,
they expressed not so much the reality as what lies behind — its
beauty and its tenderness. To give the right perspective to this
return to nature, there was needed a man who should paint life as it
is, in its naked realism, unveiled by the glamour of poetic vision.
Crabbe was this man. The most uncompromising realist, he led
poetry back to human life on its stern dark side. Born and bred
among the poor, he described, as no one else in the whole range of
English verse has done, the sordid existences among which he had
grown up. He dispelled all illusions about rural life, and dealt the
death-blow to the Corydons and Phillises of pastoral poetry. He
showed that the poor man can be more immoral and even more
unprincipled than the rich, because his higher spiritual nature is
hopelessly dwarfed in the desperate struggle to keep the wolf from
the door. He supplied harrowing texts to the social economist. He
is a gloomy poet, especially in the first part of his work, for he
paints principally the shadows that hang over the lives of the lowly;
he does not deal with that life imaginatively as Wordsworth and
Burns do, but realistically, narrating with photographic
what he saw. He excels in graphic delineations of external facts,
but is also a powerful painter of the passions, especially the more
violent ones, such as remorse and despair. Sir Eustace Grey' is a
masterful portrayal of madness.
Crabbe has at times been denied the name of poet. There is little
music in his verse, little of that singing quality that goes with all
true poetry. His versification is often slipshod and careless. His
lack of taste and artistic feeling shows itself not only in the manner
but also in the matter of his work. He dwells by preference on the
unlovely; he does not choose his details as an artist would. He is
too minute, too like those Dutch painters who bestow as much care
on the refuse as on the burnished platters of their interiors. And
again he is trivial or too literal. But the steady admiration his
poetry has excited in men of the most different tastes for several
generations shows that it has deeper qualities. The truth is, that his
## p. 4119 (#497) ###########################################
GEORGE CRABBE
4119
mean and squalid details are not mere heaps of unrelated things, nor
irrelevant to his story; they are not even mere "scenery. " They
are part of the history, in general the tragedy, of human hearts and
souls; and owe their validity as poetic material, and their power of
interesting us, to their being part of the influences that bear on the
history.
Scott had Crabbe's poems read aloud in his last illness. Horace
Smith called him "Pope in worsted stockings. " Jane Austen said
she "could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. " Cardinal Newman read the
'Tales of the Hall' with extreme delight on their first appearance,
and fifty years later still thought well of them. These different
opinions testify that whatever the shortcomings of Crabbe as crafts-
man, the earnestness and the genuineness of his work give him a
secure place among English poets.
NEX
ISAAC ASHFORD
From The Parish Register'
EXT to these ladies, but in naught allied,
A noble peasant, Isaac Ashford, died.
Noble he was, contemning all things mean,
His truth unquestioned and his soul serene:
Of no man's presence Isaac felt afraid;
At no man's question Isaac looked dismayed;
Shame knew he not; he dreaded no disgrace;
Truth, simple truth, was written in his face:
Yet while the serious thought his soul approved,
Cheerful he seemed, and gentleness he loved;
To bliss domestic he his heart resigned,
And with the firmest had the fondest mind.
Were others joyful, he looked smiling on,
And gave allowance where he needed none;
Good he refused with future ill to buy,
Nor knew a joy that caused reflection's sigh;
A friend to virtue, his unclouded breast
No envy stung, no jealousy distressed;
(Bane of the poor! it wounds their weaker mind
To miss one favor which their neighbors find. )
Yet far was he from stoic pride removed;
He felt humanely, and he warmly loved.
I marked his action when his infant died,
And his old neighbor for offense was tried:
## p. 4120 (#498) ###########################################
4120
GEORGE CRABBE
The still tears, stealing down that furrowed cheek,
Spoke pity plainer than the tongue can speak.
If pride were his, 'twas not their vulgar pride
Who in their base contempt the great deride;
Nor pride in learning: though my Clerk agreed,
If fate should call him, Ashford might succeed;
Nor pride in rustic skill, although we knew
None his superior, and his equals few:
But if that spirit in his soul had place,
It was the jealous pride that shuns disgrace;
A pride in honest fame, by virtue gained,
In sturdy boys to virtuous labors trained:
Pride in the power that guards his country's coast,
And all that Englishmen enjoy and boast;
Pride in a life that slander's tongue defied
In fact a noble passion, misnamed Pride.
He had no party's rage, no sectary's whim;
Christian and countryman was all with him:
True to his church he came; no Sunday shower
Kept him at home in that important hour;
Nor his firm feet could one persuading sect
By the strong glare of their new light direct;
"On hope in mine own sober light I gaze,
But should be blind and lose it, in your blaze. "
-
In times severe, when many a sturdy swain
Felt it his pride, his comfort, to complain,
Isaac their wants would soothe, his own would hide,
And feel in that his comfort and his pride.
I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,
And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there:
I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honored head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight,
Compelled to kneel and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers, all in dread the while,
Till Mr. Ashford softened to a smile:
No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer,
Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there;-
But he is blest, and I lament no more
A wise, good man, contented to be poor.
## p. 4121 (#499) ###########################################
GEORGE CRABBE
4121
THE PARISH WORKHOUSE AND APOTHECARY
From The Village›
TH
HEIRS is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents who know no children's love dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and-far the happiest they! —
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride embitters what it can't deny.
Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure:
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?
