rrors of the past became as a nightmare,
and in which ideals were destined to reign for ever. Cowper, an
incomparably better man than Rousseau, helped to permeate England with
that collective sentiment, which, while it does not excuse us for
neglecting our neighbour, is a good thing for preserving for nations a
healthy natural life, a more and more difficult task with the growing
complications of commercialism. Cowper here, as I say, unconsciously
performed his greatest service to humanity; and it was performed, be it
remembered, at Olney. It has been truly said that in Cowper:--

The poetry of human wrong begins, that long, long cry against
oppression and evil done by man to man, against the political, moral,
or priestly tyrant, which rings louder and louder through Burns,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever longing, ever
prophetic--never, in the darkest time, quite despairing. {47}

And Cowper achieved this without losing sight for one moment of the
essential necessity for personal worth:

Spend all thy powers
Of rant and rhapsody in Virtue's praise,
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,

and it profiteth nothing, he said in effect.

That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honest
patriotism as it had not been struck before since Milton, by the familiar
lines commencing:

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country!

As also in that stirring ballad "On the Loss of the _Royal George_:"

Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England's thunder,
And plough the distant main.

There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper did
time allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, as
one who had more than a superficial affection for it--the superficial
affection of Thomson and Gray--and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as
a lover of animal life. Cowper's love of nature was the less effective
than Wordsworth's only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth's
advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was
far less platonic than Wordsworth's. To his hares and his pigeons and
all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he
had in him the blood of kings--for, curiously enough, it is no more
difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to
William the