author of a few hymns; Bishop Lowth of some versions from the Psalms. The hymn 'Jesus, and can it ever be,' was written in 1776 by Thomas Green, of Ware, when he was only ten years old.' John Newton's vicar and predecessor at Olney was Moses Brown, who is spoken of as 'an evangelical minister and a good man.' The vicarage of Olney was only 50l. a year; and Moses Brown had a family of thirteen children. His pecuniary difficulties being, therefore, very great, he was glad to accept the chaplaincy of Morden College, Blackheath, and Newton succeeded to the cure. He was at one time much disappointed at not becoming Poet Laureate. Certainly the tenure of this office did not, in the eighteenth century, imply any considerable poetical gift. Brown might have filled it quite as worthily as some who had held it before him. But he was only a very moderate poet. His poem on the Universe and his Sunday Thoughts' received much praise, and the latter passed through at least four editions. But the circulation must have been almost entirely among a number of worthy people who cared little for the poetical in comparison with the religious merit of his poems. They were instructive and orthodox, mildly evangelistic, tolerant, except to Rome, suffused with a quiet appreciation of natural beauty, and appropriate, yet not too heavy, for Sunday reading. 'I hope,' wrote James Hervey, 'Divine Providence will give his "Sunday Thoughts" an extensive spread, and make them an instrument of diffusing the savour of true religion. Seldom, if ever, have I seen a treatise that presents the reader with so full yet concise a view, so agreeable yet striking a picture of true Christianity in its most important articles, and most distinguishing peculiarities. Though I am utterly unacquainted with the author' (they afterwards became intimate), 'I assure myself he is no novice in the sacred school.'" The Sunday Thoughts' were first published in 1750: a fourth part, including some hymns, or 'Night Songs,' was added in 1781. 1 Oxford Essays, 1858, 142. Cecil's Memoirs of J. Newton, 41. • Id., and James Hervey's Works, vi. 270. 2 Saunders, 349. s M. Brown's Sunday Thoughts, fourth ed. 1781, part 3, 984-6. Cowper was for some time under the care of Dr. Nathaniel Cotton (1707-1788), who kept a private establishment of high repute for persons of deranged intellect. The poet used to speak of him with the utmost gratitude, as a physician whose humanity was equal to his skill, and who was as capable of administering to the spiritual as to the physical maladies of his patients.' He was a man also of some literary note. His 'Visions in Verse,' published about 1751, attained a good deal of popularity, and deserved it, not as having any great poeti- ' cal merit, but as embodying in smooth, easy-flowing measure the ideas of a sensible, benevolent, and religious mind. Each vision is a kind of allegory, in which some personified quality, such as Pleasure, Health, Friendship, &c., is the principal character. Among Cotton's other poetical productions are a few hymns, one of which, beginning 'If solid happiness,' ends with this bright verse, For conscience, like a faithful friend, And faith shall fix our thankful eye Hitherto, Cowper has only been spoken of in this paper as one among the hymn writers of the latter half of the eighteenth century. It would be beyond the limits of the subject to remark upon his general merits as a poet. But in all his principal writings the religious element is strongly marked. With two or three unimportant exceptions, all his poems date from a period when religious convictions had for a long time become altogether the controlling principle of his life. His genius was late in ripening. He was fifty years old before he was known as a poet. The best and most characteristic features of Cowper's poetry are very closely related to the strong Christian feeling which actuated him. Without it, his writings might not have been deficient in sweetness and pathos; but they would have been deprived of that which conferred upon them those higher qualities which made his poems a turning-point in eighteenth1 Cowper's poem on Hope;' Cowper's Letters, July 4, 1765; Cecil's Memoirs of Newton, 45; Chalmers's Life of Cotton, 5. 2 This hymn is not in Chalmers's edition. It is from Patrick's Collection, 1786. century literature. His thorough earnestness, his transparent simplicity of moral aim, his devoted love of all goodness, his shrinking aversion from all forms of evil, his lively sense of a divine purpose and significance in all created works-these principles, operating in a sensitive and poetical temperament, were just what was wanted to give his poetry that simplicity, reality, and vigour which contrasts most favourably with the formalities and artificial graces which had been too popular before. It may be added that unaffected elevation. of moral sentiment, such as that which in Cowper was based upon pure religious feeling, gives a beauty to poetry which is almost indispensable to its highest charm. The defects of Cowper's theology are easily separable. from the solid core of Christian love and faith to which they are attached. But they too, as was inevitable in a nature such as his, have left a strong impress on his poetry. Cowper has condemned Puritanism in strong words as dark and sullen, as harsh, intolerant, and severe, without smile, sweetness, or grace. In his own mind, as it is reflected both in his poems and in his letters, there is constantly a tenderness, a gentle gaiety, a perception of humour, which is quite the reverse of Puritan moroseness. Yet he was continually falling into the same extreme which he has censured. His poetry is never so unattractive as where it is made expressive of the severe and confined views of life peculiar to the school of religious thought in which his ideas were moulded. He is often very intolerant and precise. His own home, were it not for the constitutional morbidness which religious fears aggravated, but had not occasioned, would have been a very Eden in the midst of a sinful world. And living as he did, a recluse, in the pure and harmless round of his occupations, amid the tranquil pleasures of his garden and the country, his books, his painting, his own delicate and refined thoughts, his hares, his bird-cages, among friends who loved him, and among the poor to whom he was enabled to be an almoner as well as a kind and compassionate friend, ever walking truly with his God, he was impatient that the world in general could not live after a like pattern, and had small indulgence for its sins, and scanty sympathy for its weaknesses. He thought with something like horror of the life of cities. humming with a restless crowd, Whose highest praise is that they live in vain, There seemed to him something radically wrong in such conditions of existence for a creature formed for God alone and for heaven's high purposes,' and he used all his powers as a Christian satirist to inveigh against them. Cowper was not wanting in sound practical sense and masculine power of reflection. He could lash irreligion and vice with a force and purity of tone which cannot fail to carry with it the sympathy of the reader. When, however, he descends to pass sentence upon trivial follies, or to speak of pursuits and pleasures which are simply not congenial to himself, he often loses all sense of proportion, and becomes the mere bigot. The best and wisest of counsellors is listened to with impatience if he declaims against pleasures which become noxious only by unreasonable or immoderate use, if cards and dancing are denounced as crimes, hunting as vulgarest brutality, and he who would play a game of chess is asked how he can 'waste attention on the chequered board,' and concentrate his mind upon a trivial game, 'as if eternity were hung In balance on his conduct of a pin?' Yet when the poet passed on to speak of those who devote themselves to grave studies of man or nature, he was more than ever dazed by theological contempt, more than ever the zealot. I sum up half mankind And add two-thirds of the remaining half, And find the total of their hopes and fears That spreads his motley wings in the eye of noon, 1 'Retirement.' Id., and Conversation.' 2. Progress of Error.' 'The Task,' book vi. Then follow a score or two of lines in which he pours contempt upon the 'seeming wisdom,' the 'airy reveries,' the 'plausible amusements,' the idle labours of the historian, the geologist, the astronomer. And thus they spend The little wick of life's poor, shallow lamp To distant worlds, and trifling in their own.' Much in the same style of thought is his impassioned tirade against the 'pride' of those who refuse to acknowledge that man is by nature so dead in sin as not to possess some native beams of rectitude, some inborn love of virtue.2 It was unfortunate that a poet like Cowper, whose religious influence on cultivated minds might have been so considerable, should have imbibed the mischievous persuasion that, to enhance the blessings of divine grace and the preciousness of Christian morals, all other elements of human nature must be depreciated and disparaged. Apart from this, the religious thought that enters into Cowper's general poetry is often exceedingly beautiful. However much, in his darker hours, he might doubt whether he had any right to its joy, he never doubted that a Christian's faith was as rich in happiness as in holiness. All nature glowed to such an one with more than earthly brightness. He is the freeman whom the truth makes free. His are the mountains, and the valleys his, Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye, Are they not his by a peculiar right, And by an emphasis of interest his, Whose eye they fill with tears of holy joy, Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mind ''The Task,' book iii., and ‘Charity,' towards the middle. |