"An individual was a sacred mark,

Not to be struck in sport, or in the dark."

6

Every one knows from how accidental a circumstance his greatest original work, The Task,' took its rise, namely, from his having one day complained to Lady Austen that he knew not what subject of poetry to choose, and her having told him to take her sofa for his theme. The mock-heroic commencement of The Task' has been censured as a blemish.* The general taste, I believe, does not find it so. Mr. Hayley's commendation of his art of transition may, in this instance, be fairly admitted, for he quits his ludicrous history of the sofa, and glides into a description of other objects by an easy and natural association of thoughts. His whimsical outset in a work where he promises so little and performs so much may even be advantageously contrasted with those magnificent commencements of poems which pledge both the reader and the writer, in good earnest, to a task. Cowper's poem, on the contrary, is like a river, which rises from a playful little fountain, and which gathers beauty and magnitude as it proceeds.

-"velut tenui nascens de fomite rivus
Per tacitas, primum nullo cum murmure, valles
Serpit; et ut patrii se sensim e margine fontis
Largius effudit; pluvios modo colligit imbres,
Et postquam spatio vires accepit et undas," &c.
Buchanan.

He leads us abroad into his daily walks; he exhibits the land-
scapes which he was accustomed to contemplate, and the trains
of thought in which he habitually indulged. No attempt is
made to interest us in legendary fictions or historical recollec-
tions connected with the ground over which he expatiates; all is
plainness and reality; but we instantly recognise the true poet
in the clearness, sweetness, and fidelity of his scenic draughts, in
his power of giving novelty to what is common, and in the high
relish, the exquisite enjoyment of rural sights and sounds which
he communicates to the spirit.
"His eyes drink the rivers with
delight." He excites an idea, that almost amounts to sensation,

I know not to whom he alludes in these lines:

"Nor he who, for the bane of thousands born,

Built God a church, and laugh'd His word to scorn.' ["The Calvinist meant Voltaire, and the church of Ferney, with its inscription, Deo erexit Voltaire."-Byron, Works, vol. xvi. p. 124. See also Southey's Cowper,' vol. viii. p. 305.]

* In 'The Edinburgh Review.' † An expression in one of his letters,

of the freshness and delight of a rural walk, even when he leads us to the wasteful common, which,

his

66

overgrown with fern, and rough
With prickly goss, that, shapeless and deform,
And dang rous to the touch, has yet its bloom,
And decks itself with ornaments of gold,
Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf
Smells fresh, and, rich in odorif'rous herbs
And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense

With luxury of unexpected sweets."-The Task, b. i.

His rural prospects have far less variety and compass than those of Thomson; but his graphic touches are more close and minute: not that Thomson was either deficient or undelightful in circumstantial traits of the beauty of nature, but he looked to her as a whole more than Cowper. His genius was more excursive and philosophical. The poet of Olney, on the contrary, regarded human philosophy with something of theological contempt. To eye the great and little things of this world were levelled into an equality by his recollection of the power and purposes of Him who made them. They are in his view only as toys spread on the lap and carpet of nature for the childhood of our immortal being. This religious indifference to the world is far indeed from blunting his sensibility to the genuine and simple beauties of creation, but it gives his taste a contentment and fellowship with humble things. It makes him careless of selecting and refining his views of nature beyond their casual appearance. He contemplated the face of plain rural English life in moments of leisure and sensibility, till its minutest features were impressed upon his fancy; and he sought not to embellish what he loved. Hence his landscapes have less of the ideally beautiful than Thomson's; but they have an unrivalled charm of truth and reality.

The flat country where he resided certainly exhibited none of those wilder graces of nature which he had sufficient genius to have delineated; and yet there are perhaps few romantic descriptions of rocks, precipices, and torrents, which we should prefer to the calm English character and familiar repose of the following landscape. It is in the finest manner of Cowper, and unites all his accustomed fidelity and distinctness with a softness and delicacy which are not always to be found in his specimens of the picturesque :

"How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While Admiration, feeding at the eye,

And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.

Thence with what pleasure have we just discern'd
The distant plough slow moving, and beside
His lab'ring team, that swerved not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminish'd to a boy!
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlook'd, our favourite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds;
Displaying on its varied side the grace

Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear,

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote."

The Task, b. i.

The whole scene is so defined, that one longs to see it transferred to painting.

6

He is one of the few poets who have indulged neither in descriptions nor acknowledgments of the passion of love; but there is no poet who has given us a finer conception of the amenity of female influence. Of all the verses that have been ever devoted to the subject of domestic happiness, those in his 'Winter Evening,' at the opening of the fourth book of The Task,' are perhaps the most beautiful. In perusing that scene of "intimate delights," "fireside enjoyments," and "home-born happiness," we seem to recover a part of the forgotten value of existence, when we recognise the means of its blessedness so widely dispensed and so cheaply attainable, and find them susceptible of description at once so enchanting and so faithful.

Though the scenes of The Task' are laid in retirement, the poem affords an amusing perspective of human affairs.* Remote as the poet was from the stir of the great Babel-from the " confusa sonus urbis et illætabile murmur"—he glances at most of the subjects of public interest which engaged the attention of his * [Is not The Task' a glorious poem? The religion of 'The Task,’ bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, is the religion of God and Nature; the religion that exalts and ennobles man.-Burns to Mrs. Dunlop, 25th December, 1795.]

contemporaries. On those subjects it is but faint praise to say that he espoused the side of justice and humanity. Abundance of mediocrity of talent is to be found on the same side, rather injuring than promoting the cause by its officious declamation. But nothing can be farther from the stale commonplace and cuckooism of sentiment than the philanthropic eloquence of Cowper-he speaks "like one having authority." Society is his debtor. Poetical expositions of the horrors of slavery may indeed seem very unlikely agents in contributing to destroy it; and it is possible that the most refined planter in the West Indies may look with neither shame nor compunction on his own image in the pages of Cowper, exposed as a being degraded by giving stripes and tasks to his fellow-creature. But such appeals to the heart of the community are not lost. They fix themselves silently in the popular memory, and they become at last a part of that public opinion which must sooner or later wrench the lash from the hand of the oppressor.

I should have ventured to offer a few remarks on the shorter poems of Cowper, as well as on his translation of Homer, if I had not been fearful, not only of trespassing on the reader's patience, but on the boundaries which I have been obliged to prescribe to myself in the length of these notices. There are many zealous admirers of the poet who will possibly refuse all quarter to the observations on his defects which I have freely made; but there are few who have read him, I conceive, who have been so slightly delighted as to think I have overrated his descriptions of external nature, his transcripts of human manners, or his powers, as a moral poet, of inculcating those truths and affections which make the heart feel itself better and more happy.

ERASMUS DARWIN.

[Born, 1732. Died, 1802.]

ERASMUS DARWIN was born at Elton, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a private gentleman. He studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took the degree of bachelor in medicine; after which he went to Edinburgh to finish his medical studies. Having taken a physician's degree at that university, he settled in his profession at Lichfield; and, by

a bold and successful display of his skill in one of the first cases to which he was called, established his practice and reputation. About a year after his arrival he married a Miss Howard, the daughter of a respectable inhabitant of Lichfield, and by that connexion strengthened his interest in the place. He was, in theory and practice, a rigid enemy to the use of wine and of all intoxicating liquors; and, in the course of his practice, was regarded as a great promoter of temperate habits among the citizens: but he gave a singular instance of his departure from his own theory within a few years after his arrival in the very place where he proved the apostle of sobriety. Having one day joined a few friends who were going on a water-party, he got so tipsy after a cold collation, that, on the boat approaching Nottingham, he jumped into the river and swam ashore. The party called to the philosopher to return; but he walked on deliberately, in his wet clothes, till he reached the market-place of Nottingham, and was there found by his friend, an apothecary of the place, haranguing the townspeople on the benefit of fresh air, till he was persuaded by his friend to come to his house and shift his clothes. Dr. Darwin stammered habitually; but on this occasion wine untied his tongue. In the prime of life he had the misfortune to break the patella of his knee, in consequence of attempting to drive a carriage of his own Utopian contrivance, which upset at the first experiment.

He lost his first wife after thirteen years of domestic union. During his widowhood, Mrs. Pole, the wife of a Mr. Pole, of Redburn, in Derbyshire, brought her children to his house to be cured of a poison which they had taken in the shape of medicine, and, by his invitation, she continued with him till the young patients were perfectly cured. He was soon after called to attend the lady, at her own house, in a dangerous fever, and prescribed with more than a physician's interest in her fate. Not being invited to sleep in the house the night after his arrival, he spent the hours till morning beneath a tree opposite to her apartment, watching the passing and repassing lights. While the life which he so passionately loved was in danger, he paraphrased Petrarch's celebrated sonnet on the dream which predicted to him the death of Laura. Though less favoured by the Muse than Petrarch, he was more fortunate in love. Mrs. Pole, on the demise of an aged partner, accepted Dr. Darwin's hand