etic
criticism which is the most short-sighted kind. No comprehension of him
can be got without bringing in feeling as a factor of judgment, and it
would not be singular if the moral beauty of his verse should blind
readers to its artistic faults. As a matter of fact, however, the
tendency now-a-days is to exaggerate Cowper's position rather than his
qualities, and this arises not from warmth of feeling, but from hasty
dogmatizing. There is a marked difference between _The Task_ and any
poem preceding it, but the distance from _The Task_ to _The Excursion_
is still wider. The resemblance to Wordsworth in the former poem is
tolerably superficial: it is a likeness with a difference. Cowper was
the observer, not the priest, of Nature, watching her minutely and
tenderly, but with none of Wordsworth's passion. The finest passages in
_The Task_ are wholly descriptive, and of description pure and simple
there is very little in Wordsworth's writings. Neither is there any
strong proof of Cowper's influence in the work of his successor, though
the influence felt most strongly by each was the same--that of Milton.
When M. Taine speaks of the revolution effected by Cowper as one of
style, when Mr. Lowell characterizes Wordsworth's blank verse as
"essentially the blank verse of Cowper," those eminent critics agree in
exalting Cowper above his age at the very point where he is most closely
bound to it. In sentiment he made a certain advance toward Wordsworth,
though on a lower plane, but in diction he is distinctly of the
eighteenth century. His style is often as artificial as that of any of
its rhymesters: it is full of inversions, freighted with long, formal
words, and still more marred by others of a false dilettante ring.
Wordsworth would never have spoken of "embellished Nature," "embroidered
banks," or applied the word "elegant" to a rose, any more than he would
have used "lubricity" or "stercoraceous" in verse.

Yet, formal as Cowper's language often is, narrow as are the ideas which
take up a large part of his writings, the essence of his poetry is its
truth. A false note in feeling he seldom struck, and the most artificial
language cannot hinder his lines from going direct to the heart. The
high-water mark of his genius was reached in two or three poems in which
the words are in full harmony with the thought and reflect it limpidly,
with no attempt at the "embellishment" which he too frequently employed.

In a book designed