could do to heal his
wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines
on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep {214}
and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper
found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered
round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably,
took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed
with Mrs. Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin; and amused himself with
carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which
gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he
found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in
his best poem, _The Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family
affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the
fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house,
and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a
clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper
was an out-door as well as an in-door man. The Olney landscape was
tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between
plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless
Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more
imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_ reflects, also, the new
philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the
brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France and
which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of
Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent
revival preacher; {215} of John and Charles Wesley, and of the
Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English
Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's
conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper's
first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems, 1782, written under
Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat
intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and
theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he wrote. He
was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the
invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And,
indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He
lived much among women,