The Project Gutenberg eBook, Cowper, by Goldwin Smith

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Title: Cowper

Author: Goldwin Smith

Release Date: June 29, 2004 [eBook #12772]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COWPER***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

COWPER

BY

GOLDWIN SMITH

London, 1880

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
Early Life

CHAPTER II.
At Huntingdon--The Unwins

CHAPTER III.
At Olney--Mr. Newton

CHAPTER IV.
Authorship--The Moral Satires

CHAPTER V.
The Task

CHAPTER VI.
Short Poems and Translations

CHAPTER VII.
The Letters

CHAPTER VIII.
Close of Life

COWPER.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE.

Cowper is the most important English poet of the period between Pope
and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley,
which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution.
As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to
nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of
sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social
system, he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the
revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all. As a
sentimentalist he presents a faint analogy to Rousseau, whom in natural
temperament he somewhat resembled. He was also the great poet of the
religious revival which marked the latter part of the eighteenth
century in England, and which was called Evangelicism within the
establishment and Methodism without. In this way he is associated with
Wesley and Whitefield, as well as with the philanthropists of the
movement, such as Wilberforce, Thornton, and Clarkson. As a poet he
touches, on different sides of his character, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and
Burns. With Goldsmith and Crabbe he shares the honour of improving
English taste in the sense of truthfulness and simplicity. To Burns he
felt his affinity, across a gulf of social circumstance, and in spite
of a dialect not yet made fashionable by Scott. Besides his poetry, he
holds a high, perhaps the highest place, among English letter writers:
and the collection of his lette