With quickened step,

Brown Night retires: young Day pours in apace
And opens all the lawny prospect wide.
The dripping rock, the mountain's misty top,
Swell on the sight, and brighten with the dawn.
Blue, through the dusk, the smoking currents s
And from the bladed field the fearful hare
Limps, awkward: while along the forest-glade
The wild deer trip, and, often turning, gaze
At early passenger. Music awakes
The native voice of undissembled joy;

And thick around the woodland hymns arise.
Roused by the cock, the soon clad shepherd leave
His mossy cottage, where with Peace he dwells;
And from the crowded fold, in order, drives
His flock, to taste the verdure of the morn.

William Cowper, who was born in 1731, has b scribed as a link between Thomson and Wordsw he threw off the last traces of Pope's artifice of view of nature as a trim parterre. He lived the qui try lives; he loved children, cats, hares, and flowe shared Wordsworth's passion for the lakes, the m the starry heavens, it was rather for their external for the mysterious life of things, the spirit that ma not seen, which Wordsworth, in a still communio his soul. Yet many of Cowper's best-known lines grandeur in simplicity which has kept them swee Such is the splendid hymn, "God moves in a mys and the dirge on the loss of the Royal George:

Toll for the brave!

The brave that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,

Fast by their native shore!

Toll for the brave!

Brave Kempenfelt is gone;
His last sea-fight is fought;

His work of glory done.

Weigh the vessel up,

Once dreaded by our foes!

And mingle with our cup

The tears that England owes.

Her timbers yet are sound,

And she may float again,

Full charged with England's thunder,
And plough the distant main.

But Kempenfelt is gone,

His victories are o'er;

And he and his eight hundred

Shall plough the wave no more.

Nor can the lines on his Mother's Portrait be easily surpassed. Many of the passages, so sweet and sad and simple, are such as, having once been read, can never be forgotten.

Cowper suffered from hysteria, and was for a while shut up in a private asylum. After his recovery, religion became an obsession with him and coloured the rest of his life, sometimes obviously affording him comfort, and at other times filling him with hopeless despair.

But it must not be forgotten that, although one of the most

melancholy of poets, Cowper had his lighter hours. only call to mind "John Gilpin," and his letters to so full of gayest wit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See the Cambridge History of English Literature, for ful of these poets.

See the Section on the Poets in Thomas Seccombe's The A and also Edmund Gosse's Eighteenth Century Literature.

There are volumes in the "English Men of Letters" Series ing: Goldsmith, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, and Thomson.

Excellent editions of the works of the following poets are i Standard Authors" and the "Oxford Poets": William Cowper, G Thomas Gray and William Collins (1 vol.), and James Thom

XX

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE