a on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness
and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship
in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that
close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of
particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions.
How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning
sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and
investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his
song--not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a
bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a
"hint that Nature lives;" and yet his song is never trivial, for he is
alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his
glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by
supercilious allusions to the "brutes" and the "stalls," he interests us
in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door,

"Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps
_In unsuspecting pomp_;"

in the patient cattle, that on the winter's morning

"Mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
_In unrecumbent sadness_;"

in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk,

"At once, swift as a bird,
Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush,
And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud,
With all the prettiness of feign'd alarm
And anger insignificantly fierce."

And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish
reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance which belongs to
thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling:

"The heart is hard in nature, and unfit
For human fellowship, as being void
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike
To love and friendship both, that is not pleased
With sight of animals enjoying life,
Nor feels their happiness augment his own."

His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human
life--the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the
cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth, while
her infants "sit cowering o'er the sparks,"

"Retires, content to quake, so they be warm'd;"

or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick