deist and atheist are publicly birched.

It is not for his satires that 杭州会所论坛 Cowper is remembered: they were suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to Cowper “The Task,” or rather gave him the subject of “The Sofa,” out of which grew “The Task”. The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he

Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,
The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.

[Pg 439]

This introduces a rural digression.

Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads 杭州夜生活杭州百花坊 with cattle sprinkled o’er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted.

We think of

a river winding slow
By cattle, on an endless plain;
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow streaks of rain.

How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises “retirement,” welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, “The Retired Cat,” temporarily shut up in a drawer lined “with linen of the softest kind,” he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious 杭州夜网杭州龙凤网 reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough’s, and studies of cattle like Morland’s. “The Task” won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were attained by Thomson), “The Task” may still be read with sympathy and pleasure.

Many of Cowper’s shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories: “The Wreck of the Royal George,” as spirited and sad as a ballad; the ringing notes of “Boadicea”; 杭州按摩电话 the idyllic sweetness of

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;

the lines, “Addressed to a Young Lady,” brief and beautiful as the most tender epigrams of “The Greek Anthology,” from which Cowper’s translating hand 杭州水疗半套 gathered a little garland. Of these “The Swallow,” “Attic Maid with Honey Fed,” are worthy of the[Pg 440] original, as is “The Grass-hopper”. Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters such as “The Dog and the Water-lily”; and pretty kindly compliments, such as “Gratitude” (to his cousin,

Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the “Epitaph on a Hare,” and the “To Mary” (of 1793). His “John Gilpin” is an unusual frolic.

The tr