rarch's sonnets have a more ethereal
grace and a more perfect finish; Shakespeare's more passion; Milton's
stand supreme in stateliness; Wordsworth's in depth and delicacy. But
Cowper's unites with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the
ancients would have called Irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness
peculiar to his loving and ingenuous nature.--There is much mannerism,
much that is unimportant or of now exhausted interest in his poems:
but where he is great, it is with that elementary greatness which
rests on the most universal human feelings. Cowper is our highest
master in simple pathos.

193 205 Cowper's last original poem, founded upon a story told in
Anson's 'Voyages.' It was written March 1799; he died in next year's
April.

195 206 Very little except his name appears recoverable with regard
to the author of this truly noble poem, which appeared in the
'Scripscrapologia, or Collins' Doggerel Dish of All Sorts,' with three
or four other pieces of merit, Birmingham, 1804.--_Everlasting_; used
with side-allusion to a cloth so named, at the time when Collins
wrote.

_Summary of Book Fourth_

It proves sufficiently the lavish wealth of our own age in Poetry,
that the pieces which, without conscious departure from the standard
of Excellence, render this Book by far the longest, were with very few
exceptions composed during the first thirty years of the Nineteenth
century. Exhaustive reasons can hardly be given for the strangely
sudden appearance of individual genius: that, however, which assigns
the splendid national achievements of our recent poetry to an impulse
from the France of the first Republic and Empire is inadequate. The
first French Revolution was rather one result,--the most conspicuous,
indeed, yet itself in great measure essentially retrogressive,--of
that wider and more potent spirit which through enquiry and attempt,
through strength and weakness, sweeps mankind round the circles (not,
as some too confidently argue, of Advance, but) of gradual
Transformation: and it is to this that we must trace the literature of
Modern Europe. But, without attempting discussion on the motive causes
of Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others, we may observe that these
Poets carried to further perfection the later tendencies of the
Century preceding, in simplicity of narrative, reverence for human
Passion and Character in every sphere, and love of Nature for
herself:--that, whilst maintaining on th