e Arctic to the Antarctic circle.'
The earth and the sun itself are, he says, but 'baubles;' but they are
the baubles which alone can distract his attention from more awful
prospects. His little garden and greenhouse are playthings lent to him
for a time, and soon to be left. He 'never framed a wish or formed a
plan,' as he says in the 'Task,' of which the scene was not laid in the
country; and when the gloomiest forebodings unhinged his mind, his love
became a passion. He is like his own prisoner in the Bastille playing
with spiders. All other avenues of delight are closed to him; he
believes, whenever his dark hour of serious thought returns, that he is
soon to be carried off to unspeakable torments; all ordinary methods of
human pleasure seem to be tainted with some corrupting influence; but
whilst playing with his spaniel, or watching his cucumbers, or walking
with Mrs. Unwin in the fields, he can for a moment distract his mind
with purely innocent pleasures. The awful background of his visions,
never quite absent, though often, we may hope, far removed from actual
consciousness, throws out these hours of delight into more prominent
relief. The sternest of his monitors, John Newton himself, could hardly
grudge this cup of cold water presented, as it were, to the lips of a
man in a self-made purgatory.

This is the peculiar turn which gives so characteristic a tone to
Cowper's loving portraits of scenery. He is like the Judas seen by St.
Brandan on the iceberg; he is enjoying a momentary relaxation between
the past of misery and the future of anticipated torment. Such a
sentiment must, fortunately, be in some sense exceptional and
idiosyncratic. And yet, once more, it fell in with the prevailing
current of thought. Cowper agrees with Rousseau in finding that the
contemplation of scenery, unpolluted by human passion, and the enjoyment
of a calm domestic life is the best anodyne for a spirit wearied with
the perpetual disorders of a corrupt social order. He differs from him,
as we have seen, in the conviction that a deeper remedy is wanting than
any mere political change; in a more profound sense of human wickedness,
and, on the other hand, in a narrower estimate of the conditions of
human life. His definition of Nature, to put it logically, would exclude
that natural man in whose potential existence Rousseau more or less
believed. The passionate love of scenery was enough to distinguish him
from the poets of the prece