no loss for scriptural
precedents, when recognising the immediate voice of God in thunder and
earthquakes, or in the calmer voices of the waterbrooks and the meadows.
His love of nature, at any rate, is at once of a narrower and sincerer
kind than that which Rousseau first made fashionable. He has no tendency
to the misanthropic or cynical view which induces men of morbid or
affected minds to profess a love of savage scenery simply because it is
savage. Neither does he rise to the more philosophical view which sees
in the seas and the mountains the most striking symbols of the great
forces of the universe to which we must accommodate ourselves, and which
might therefore rightfully be associated by a Wordsworth with the
deepest emotions of reverential awe. Nature is to him but a collection
of 'baubles,' soon to be taken away, and he seeks in its contemplation
a temporary relief from anguish, not a permanent object of worship. He
would dread that sentiment as a deistical form of idolatry; and he is
equally far from thinking that the natural man, wherever that vague
person might be found, could possibly be a desirable object of
imitation. His love of nature, in short, keen as it might be, was not
the reflection of any philosophical, religious, or political theory. But
it was genuine enough to charm many who might regard his theological
sentiments as a mere recrudescence of an obsolete form of belief. Mr.
Mill tells us how Wordsworth's poetry, little as he sympathised with
Wordsworth's opinions, solaced an intellect wearied with premature Greek
and over-doses of Benthamism. Such a relief must have come to many
readers of Cowper, who would put down his religion as rank fanaticism,
and his satire as anile declamation. Men suffered even then--though
Cowper was a predecessor of Miss Austen--from existing forms of 'life at
high pressure.' If life was not then so overcrowded, the evils under
which men were suffering appeared to be even more hopeless. The great
lesson of the value of intervals of calm retreat, of silence and
meditation, was already needed, if it is now still more pressing. Cowper
said, substantially, Leave the world, as Rousseau said, Upset the world.
The reformer, to say nothing of his greater intellectual power,
naturally interested the world which he threatened more than the recluse
whom it frightened. Limited within a narrower circle of ideas, and
living in a society where the great issues of the time were not