THE POET COWPER.

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By REV. J. N. DANFORTH.

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In contemplating the varieties of human kind, nothing is more obvious than that some men are endowed with genius for the production of one set of results, while others are invested with the same power with a manifest adaptation to different results. So the interior texture of that impalpable thing we call genius, is diverse in various subjects. In some we find the development of extraordinary energies, in others the elaboration of the gentler traits of character. Some are eminently capable of devising, others of executing. One man is distinguished for the ardor of his imagination, another for the soundness of his judgment. A bold, daring temper of mind is indigenous to one class; a gentle, timid disposition characterizes another. The spirit of sarcasm, of irony, of invective, riots in the mental activities of some men, while that of tenderness, benevolence, and habitual charitableness constitutes the repose of others. Of the former, Byron might be mentioned as an example; of the latter, Cowper. They were both men of acknowledged genius. The world has adjudicated on their respective titles to the inheritance of fame. But how different the men!

It may be true that the qualities of Byron were more fitted to excite the stronger and sterner, as they certainly were to awaken the severer and more rampant feelings of our nature, while those of Cowper tend to elicit whatever in man is tender, reverent, social and sympathetic. He is eminently the poet of the home and the heart, and even when contending with the foul and formidable spirit of melancholy, he strives to make others cheerful and happy.

In one of his letters he says that his own experience contradicts the philosophical axiom that nothing can communicate what it has not in itself, for that he wrote certain poems “to amuse a mind oppressed with melancholy,” and that by so doing he has “comforted others, at the same time that they administer to me no consolation.” One can hardly believe that from a mind over which hung such clouds and darkness there could issue such a piece as “John Gilpin,” or the “Report of an adjudged case, not to be found in any of the books.” Yet the mind of man is wondrous! What powerful efforts will it not make to rise into a region, where it can behold the cheerful light of day, and breathe the healthful air of freedom. Cowper long looked upon himself as a doomed reprobate, a hopeless exile from the favor of God—but faith triumphed at last. That exploded absurdity—that a powerful genius must necessarily reside in a slender and morbid frame—seems long to have possessed even intelligent minds. Education is coming to be considered as properly embracing our whole physical, intellectual, and moral being, and the time, we hope, is at hand, when it will be no reproach to carry about a robust mind in a robust body. Indeed we have among the intellectual magnates of the land, men of massive fames and ample physical development. Look at the stalwort line of Secretaries of State for some years past!

But a poet must be a man of more ethereal mould. Why so? Behold Sir Walter Scott, that man of regal imagination, who breathed the spirit of poetry into the body of his romance, and transfused romance into his poetry, while with dramatic energy and verisimilitude he summons before us, on the stage he has erected, the stirring scenes and characters of other days, as with the wand of an enchanter. What an athletic form ministered to the commands of his kingly mind, for it was he who loved to say, “My mind to me a kingdom is.” And Johnson, the critic, moralist, essayist, lexicographer, poet—yes, POET, for in his great mind the elements of the sublime and beautiful lay in all their wondrous nativity; Johnson was a man of giant physical strength, of an apparent animalism too awkward to admit of refinement in this world. Burns, too, was a man of massive mould, yet how exquisitely poetical. The philosophy of the union of soul and body is as yet little understood. We want healthy men to conduct the affairs of the world, as well as to serve in the Court of the Muses and the Graces. What injuries have States sustained; what interruptions of the peace of the world have been caused by a fit of the gout, of dyspepsy, of morbid melancholy, of base intemperance, or by some paroxysm of passion engendered by the humors of an unhealthy body. The very Union of the States may be endangered by these causes.

Had Cowper been free from those distressing maladies, from the depredations of that “fierce banditti,” as he calls them,

“That with a black, infernal train,

Make cruel inroads in the brain,”

how much happier had he been, how much more might he have accomplished. Pity, not censure; charity, not severity, are due to the interesting sufferer, who had too much timidity to read aloud before his superiors, thereby losing a good office. That, however, was a trifle, compared with the deep fountain of melancholy that existed within him, whose waters no kind angel descending from heaven healed by casting in some celestial gift. Religion itself became tinged with the dark coloring of the disease it would relieve. To most pilgrims of Time the “New Year” is a cheerful season. “Happy” wishes then fly in clusters all around the domestic and the social circles. How does Cowper speak of the old year? “I looked back upon all the passages and occurrences of it as a traveler looks back upon a wilderness, through which he has passed with weariness and sorrow of heart, reaping no other fruit of his labor than the poor consolation, that, dreary as the desert was, he left it all behind him.” While indulging a similar strain of lugubriousness, his thoughts fall into the natural language of the poet: “Nature revives again, but a soul once slain, lives no more. The hedge that has been apparently dead is not so: it will burst into leaf, and blossom at the appointed time; but no such time is appointed for the stake that stands in it. It is as dead as it seems, and will prove itself no dissembler.” Mournfully beautiful! And thus had he been talking for eleven lingering years, long enough to make “despair an inveterate habit.”

We do not recollect that any of the biographers of Cowper have given sufficient weight, if they have even adverted to one very natural cause of depression, the destitution of any regular profession or employment for nearly seventy years, with no wife to love, no children to provide for. It were enough to wither even a joyous temperament. “The color of our whole life,” said Cowper, “is generally such as the first three or four years in which we are our own masters make it. Then it is that we may be said to shape our own destiny, and to treasure up for ourselves a series of future successes or disappointments.” Those years were spent in idleness, to the influence of which was added the effect of his mortifying failure as clerk to the House of Lords, thus throwing him upon any chance resources for the supply of the various wants of life. The final result was the providential overruling of the whole to the production of a consummate poet. “Had I employed my time as wisely as you,” he writes to his friend, Mr. Rose, “in a situation very similar to yours, I had never been a poet perhaps, but I might by this time have acquired a character of more importance in society.”

He had reached fifty years before Fame had dropped a single wreath upon his brow, or he had even seriously courted the poetic Muse. “Dejection of spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an author, made me one. I find constant employment necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly employed.” He seems to have thought that the season of winter was the most congenial to the operations of his mind and the productions of his fancy. “The season of the year which generally pinches off the flowers of poetry, unfolds mine, such as they are, and crowns me with a winter garland. In this respect, therefore, I and my contemporary bards are by no means upon a par. They write when the delightful influence of fine weather, fine prospects, and a brisk motion of the animal spirits make poetry almost the language of nature; and I, when icicles depend from all the leaves of the Parnassian laurel, and when a reasonable man would as little expect to succeed in verse, as to hear a blackbird whistle.” The very spirit of modesty breathing through language deeply poetical! It is the province of genius, in its imaginative forms, to render tributary to its object the whole circle of the seasons, and to expound the thousand occult meanings of nature in her depths and her varieties, as well as to exhibit the more obvious images of beauty, of which she furnishes in such profusion the striking originals. Hear the voice of his Muse apostrophizing even stern Winter:

“I crown thee king of intimate delights,

Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness!”

Bachelor as he was, he sought his chief happiness in the interior sanctities of domestic life. There his gentle spirit was nourished with the aliment drawn from the purest sources of friendship and virtue, and thence his imagination took its flights, not bold, but beautiful, not ascending to the lofty height of Milton’s “great argument,” but holding its graceful way through that middle region of thought, and fancy, and feeling, familiar to the mass of minds in any measure susceptible to the beauties of poetry. The critics of half a century ago, while they hesitated to admit Cowper to that high rank among the great poets, which has been adjudged him by the verdict of posterity, confessed that his works contained many traits of strong and original genius, and a richness of idiomatic phraseology seldom equalled in the English language. Readers of poetry had become so accustomed to the refined diction and polished versification of his predecessors—Addison, Pope, Gray, and Prior—that they were slow to welcome a new aspirant for the bays, who came with a free, unfettered, and even somewhat careless air to claim their homage. He might gather a few humble flowers along the sides of Parnassus, but to think of reaping near its summit was the height of presumption. Yet which of those poets has now so many readers as Cowper? Goldsmith may better compare with him for permanence and extent of interest, so eminently natural is he; but what shall be said of Dryden, earlier, it is true, than the others, but one who had long been considered as having passed into the apotheosis of the Dii majores? He may have one reader to five hundred who luxuriate in Cowper’s parlor, alcove, and garden, with the Task in hand.

Then for purity, what a contrast between these last two. The Bard of Christianity, as he has been called, wrote no line, which, “dying he would wish to blot.” To Cowper the sentiment is more impressively applicable by the suffrage of the public mind, than Thomson, to whom it is applied by Lord Lyttleton—and deservedly so. They both communed with Nature, the one with her minute lights and shades, the other with her grander forms and more striking developments. The imagination of Cowper, like the microscopic glass, detected the shape and tint of the very petal of a flower. That of Thomson ranged with the sweep of the telescope through fields of light, and distant spheres, radiant with beauty and vocal with harmony. Each fulfilled his mission with dignity, propriety, and devotion, causing us to pray O! si sic omnes! But the nineteenth century has produced so much mysticism, such an amount of nebulous metaphysics in poetry and prose, as to make some honest people doubt the lawfulness of their veneration for the standard poets, especially the more intelligible ones, or whether there is any such thing as standard poetry. Coleridge, indeed, is clear, solemn, and sublime, when he approaches nearest to Milton, as in his Sunrise Hymn; and Wordsworth is most natural, perspicuous, and impressive, when he most resembles Cowper; but Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning—what do they mean in half their poetry?

Cowper stands almost alone in having nothing to do with the passion of love, which has always figured at such a rate in all sorts of novels, dramas, and poems. It was not because he was destitute of sensibility. His life was a tender sentiment, his heart was formed for friendship; he was even an admirer of the female sex, and he entrusted the happiness of his life to the care and sympathy of female friends; but the romance of the tender passion was beneath the dignity of his Muse, while for real purity of affection, as well as of imagination, no poet has been more distinguished. He possesses the sweetness, if not the grandeur of Milton; and if he does not emulate the song of the Seraphim, who, in their exalted spheres, minister so near the throne of the Eternal, his strain is ever coincident with the thousand choral harmonies of nature and mind around him. In speaking of the influence of the “country” upon his mind, even that country which “God made,” he says, with enthusiasm,

“I never framed a wish, or formed a plan,

That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss,

But there I laid the scene; there early strayed

My fancy, ere yet liberty of choice

Had found me, or the hope of being free.

My very dreams were rural; rural, too,

The first born efforts of my youthful muse.”

The regions of fiction he left others to explore; the artificial manners of a polished age; the martial deeds of heroic periods he relinquished to their admirers, and devoted himself to the socialities of domestic life, to the promotion of pure morals, and the elevation of public sentiment on a proper basis, and to a worthy standard. “He impresses us,” says Campbell, “with the idea of a being, whose fine spirit had been long enough in the mixed society of the world to be polished by its intercourse, and yet withdrawn so soon as to retain an unworldly degree of purity and simplicity.” He listened with alacrity to the secret suggestions of the spirit of philanthropy, and at times rose to the solemn dignity and fervor of a prophet’s strain, thus realizing the classic, nay, the Hebraic idea of the union of poet and prophet in the same venerated person.

Among those sentiments which have been incorporated into the thinking and speaking of men, may be found many of the conceptions of Cowper’s genius, especially as embodied in the Task, near the conclusion of which he ascends to so lofty a height, as to remind us of the sublimity of Milton. It is perfectly obvious, that before his muse took that flight, she had bathed her wing in the fountain of inspiration. The voice of the bard seems to echo that of the Hebrew prophet, as he stood upon the Mount of Vision, and beheld the unfolding glories of the latter day.

The satire of Cowper was at times as keen as his own sensibilities, yet blending itself with a gentle manner and a genial humor, it disarmed all suspicion of malignity in its composition, thus augmenting its moral power. Vice, folly, and even finery, felt the sharpness of his satire. In his themes, as in so many clear mirrors, we see reflected the multiplied images of the spirit of the man. Truth, Hope, Charity, Retirement, Ode to Peace, Human Frailty, the Rose, the Doves, the Glowworm, Lily, Nosegay, Epitaph on a Hare, such are the subjects that wakened in him congenial thought and feeling. The lines on his Mother’s Portrait are exquisitely tender and affecting, instinct with love, overflowing with affection, with that love which is never so intense as when softened by affliction, and intertwined with pensive recollections of the past. His pieces are not wrought with the perfection and coldness of artistic skill, like those of the sculptor, but flow from the imagination right through the channel of the heart, taking the most natural shape and costume of the moment and the occasion.

The great critic of the North, who sat so many years on the Bench of Literature before he occupied the Bench of Civil Justice, from which death has recently called him, thus pronounced his opinion of Cowper: “The great variety and truth of his descriptions; the sterling weight and sense of most of his observations, and, above all, the great appearance of facility with which every thing is executed, and the happy use he has so often made of the most ordinary language, all concur to stamp upon his poems the character of original genius, and remind us of the merits that have secured immortality to Shakspeare.”

Little need be added concerning his prose. It is known to have been eminently easy and natural. His letters especially are models. It is sufficient praise to say, that Robert Hall, that master of the art of composition, thus speaks of Cowper: “I have always considered his letters as the finest specimens of the epistolary style in our language. To an air of inimitable ease and negligence, they unite a high degree of correctness, such as could result only from the clearest intellect, combined with the most finished taste. I have scarcely found a single word which is capable of being exchanged for a better. Literary errors I can discern none. The selection of the words, and the structure of the periods are inimitable; they present as striking a contrast as can well be conceived to the turgid verbosity which passes at present for fine writing, and which bears a great resemblance to the degeneracy which marks the style of Ammianus Marcellinus, as compared to that of Cicero and Livy. A perpetual effort and struggle is made to supply the place of vigor; garish and dazzling colors are substituted for chaste ornament, and the hideous distortions of weakness for native strength. In my humble opinion, the study of Cowper’s prose may on this account be as useful in forming the taste of young people as his poetry.”