tirizes the clergy and the universities).

Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith,
as "the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age,
the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface
of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment
which had long ceased to flow."

The greatest things in this world are often done by those
who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true
of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission
he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it.
And so temporal are the world's standards, in the best of times,
that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until
long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did
are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.

"Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly
Down to towered Camelot:

And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, 'Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott."

John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman
entitled `The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence
from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas",
whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable,
and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again,
something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature,
a man must be found not educated under its influence."

Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was

"Strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation",

and who

"Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,--
Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created."

John Keats, in his poem entitled `Sleep and Poetry',
has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between
the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period.
After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets
of the Elizabethan period, he continues:--

"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant