by senators unpraised,
Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the power
Of earth and hell confederate take away.

The patriot is lower than the martyr, though more highly prized by the
world; and Cowper changes his strain of patriotic fervour into a
prolonged devotional comment upon the text,

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides.

Who would have thought that we could glide so easily into so solemn a
topic from looking at the quaint freaks of morning shadows? But the
charm of the 'Task' is its sincerity; and in Cowper's mind the most
trivial objects really are connected by subtle threads of association
with the most solemn thoughts. He begins with mock heroics on the sofa,
and ends with a glowing vision of the millennium. No dream of human
perfectibility, but the expected advent of the true Ruler of the earth,
is the relief to the palpable darkness of the existing world. The
'Winter Walk' traces the circle of thought through which his mind
invariably revolves.

It would be a waste of labour to draw out in definite formula the
systems adopted, from emotional sympathy, rather than from any logical
speculation, by Cowper and Rousseau. Each in some degree owed his
power--though Rousseau in a far higher degree than Cowper--to his
profound sensitiveness to the heavy burden of the time. Each of them
felt like a personal grief, and exaggerated in a distempered
imagination, the weariness and the forebodings more dimly present to
contemporaries. In an age when old forms of government had grown rigid
and obsolete, when the stiffened crust of society was beginning to heave
with new throes, when ancient faiths had left mere husks of dead formulae
to cramp the minds of men, when even superficial observers were startled
by vague omens of a coming crash, or expected some melodramatic
regeneration of the world, it was perhaps not strange that two men,
tottering on the verge of madness, should be amongst the most
impressive prophets. The truth of Butler's speculation, that nations,
like individuals, might go mad, was about to receive an apparent
confirmation. Cowper, like Rousseau, might see the world through the
distorting haze of a disordered fancy, but the world at large was itself
strangely disordered, and the smouldering discontent of the inarticulate
masses found an echo in their passionate utterances. Their voices were
like the moan of a coming earthquake.

The difference, ho