Italian sonnet will like to notice how admirably the division between the octave and sextet is marked; and will be confirmed in their conviction that, though genius can do many things, it can never make any sort of irregular sonnet produce an effect equal to this beautiful rise and fall.

Nothing need be said of the occasional pieces, except that lovers of tobacco will find the most poetic of the praises their goddess has ever received in the lines addressed by a poet who did not worship her to his friend Mr. Bull who did; that more charming verse has never been made out of a trifling incident than the humorous lines that relate the adventure of the poet's cat and give us so many glimpses of the poet by the way; that no dogs were ever happier in their elegist than those whose epitaphs may still be read, with increasing difficulty, on their tombstones in the Wilderness at Weston. Their fame was secured them in some of the poet's last happy days; when he had once left the Wilderness, never to return, there were no more happy days and no more trifles in verse. The only verse of any importance written during the last sad years in Norfolk was the "Castaway," which in its very power and intensity is the most awful evidence of the final shipwreck of his reason. The easy stanza in which it is composed is not the most effective for so terrible a theme ; but no neglect of the more artificial means of producing poetic effect could detract from the result where the story itself is told with an energy of concentration that comes straight from an experience written in burning letters on the poor poet's heart and brain.

The rest of Cowper's poems are translations from the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. The most important of these, the translation of Homer, in which he himself took so much pride and pleasure, is omitted in this edition from considerations of space.

No attempt has been made in this Introduction to claim for Cowper the rank of our greatest poets. Such an attempt would be an absurdity. But with him, as with others, the thing is to distinguish the essential and immortal part from the transitory and accidental. They cannot, indeed, be definitely separated, for the poet himself has joined them together. But the needful thing is that the one should not hide from us the presence and beauty of the other. No truer poet than William Cowper ever wrote the English language. He did greater things than he knew, and if he had known their greatness might have done greater still. It is possible to look at Nature through many different sorts of glasses. The Elizabethans looked at her chiefly through a glass of rather far-fetched fancy; Milton chiefly through a richly coloured glass of universal scholarship; Thomson through one of rhetoric, abstraction, and Deism. Cowper's way is quite unlike any of them. Neither fancy, nor learning, nor philosophy came between him and his object. His creed does occasionally; his sympathetic tenderness

always. Otherwise it is the thing itself, river, tree, or hill, that he gives us in naked simplicity. That simplicity was the central element in his character, and it is the secret both of what he confessed and of what he discovered. The perfectly simple can ask questions and reveal facts which no one else can reveal or ask. So it was with Cowper. He takes up his pen to amuse himself, to describe his walks, and his friends, and his garden, and his pets, and in the result finds himself, as it were by accident, a great poet, and a poet of a new order. He, more than any one else, discovered that a man may be himself, and may tell the plain truth, and yet be a poet. It is a discovery which has since been pushed too far; but in his day it was real and important. Previous poets had used their own experiences and feelings often enough, but as a rule they had dressed them up for appearance on the printed page. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. But Cowper did not do it, and that he did not is both his strength and his weakness. It is his weakness, because by confining himself to a plain confession of his own feelings and doings, and those of his little circle of friends, he could not attempt to deal with human life in its variety and complexity, as his contemporary Crabbe did both before and after him with such vigour and truth, and because not only human life as a whole, but also Nature as a whole, was, by these restrictions, out of his reach. The large philosophy of Wordsworth was as impossible for him as the universal portrait gallery of Crabbe. But this limitation was also Cowper's strength. For it may have been only on condition of renouncing loftier ambitions that he succeeded in placing himself, his own heart, and his little world, on the page of his verse, with such admirable ease, intimacy, and truth. And to have done that is to be immortal, for, in poetry, immortality lies just therein the felicitous marriage of what is beautiful and what

is true.

APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION

UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF WILLIAM

COWPER

I. TO JOHN AND CATHARINE JOHNSON
II. TO JOSEPH HILL

TT has been thought desirable to take the present opportunity of

which allusion has been made in the foregoing introduction. The letters to Joseph Hill are the property of the Rev. Canon Cowper Johnson, of Yaxham Rectory; and those addressed to John and Catharine Johnson belong to the Rev. Henry Barham Johnson, of Welborne Rectory, Norfolk. There are fourteen letters addressed to John Johnson and his sister, four of which have been already partially published. The part previously published is small. To Joseph Hill there are twenty-one letters, of one of which one paragraph has been printed before. To these five partially published letters, foot-notes, mentioning that fact, are appended. All the rest are entirely new. Their chief interest is to illustrate afresh the swiftness of affection with which Cowper went to meet his new-found Norfolk relations, and the entirely trusting tenacity with which he clung to the tried friendship of Hill.

LETTERS TO JOHN AND CATHARINE

JOHNSON

1

Weston, December 18th, 1790

MY DEAREST JOHNNY,

I address you with a new pen, a great rarity with me, and for which I am indebted to my Lady Cousin. And this I do the very day after the receipt of your letter, having an ardent desire to tell you in legible characters how much I, and how much we all love and are obliged to you. The oysters, like those you sent first, surpass all encomium; and the Cottenham cheeses were especially welcome, being always cheeses that deserve to be numbered among the best in the world, and cheeses beside which we have not tasted many years. We thank you with no common thanks, but with such as your kindness merits.

But what thanks can I render you proportioned to your zeal exerted in favour of my subscription ? Be assured that I shall never forget it, speed as it may, and in order to immortalize it will record it immediately in verse which must be of the extemporary kind, because I have no time for anything better.

There was no market town in all

The land of the Iceni,

Where Johnny did not loudly call
For everybody's guinea.

But gold was scarce, and we regret,
That folks were grown so wise

That few thought Homer half so sweet

As sausage and mince pies.

I fear, my Johnny, that this will prove the case, but whether it should or not my obligation to thee is equal. In the mean time I perceive myself so flattered by the instances of illustrious success mentioned in your letter, that I feel all the amiable modesty, for which I was once so famous, sensibly giving way to a spirit of vainglory. The King's College subscription makes me proud, the effect that my verses have had on your two young friends, the mathematicians, makes me proud; and I am, if possible, prouder

* Part of this letter has already been printed.