ly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age. The
last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death
mercifully ended the struggle in 1800. His last poem, "The Castaway," is a
cry of despair, in which, under guise of a man washed overboard in a storm,
he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to
help.

COWPER'S WORKS. Cowper's first volume of poems, containing "The Progress of
Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how
the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age. These poems are
dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein of
pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader. For Cowper was a humorist, and
only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that
line alone.

_The Task_, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper's
longest poem. Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this
work. Much of it is conventional and "wooden," to be sure, like much of
Wordsworth's poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the
artificial couplets of Johnson's age, we turn suddenly to Cowper's
description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks, of plowmen and teamsters
and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of
a better day in poetry:

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks:
News from all nations lumbering at his back.
True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn,
And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

Cowper's most laborious work, the translation of Homer in blank verse, was
published in 1791. Its stately, Milton-like movement, and its better
rendering of the Gree