s not our greenhouse a cabinet of
perfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only
constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the
terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough
of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who
passed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bath
on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried
in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green_, and _On the
Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of
woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in
the great tragedies. The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is an
image of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how
he felt. He replied, "I feel unutterable despair." To face damnation with
the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly
accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors
with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and
Dickens.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion
that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness,
would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit,"
he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt
it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words
long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was
never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are
not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with
wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:

"The cups
That cheer but not inebriate;"

"God made the country and man made the town;"

"I am monarch of all I survey;"

"Regions Caesar never knew;" and

"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!"

This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something
more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed
Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass
into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of
temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from
Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same
pleasures;