first edition
of Palgrave's _Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry_, he came near to Cowper
in his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in that
precious volume Cowper ranks third--that is, after Shakspere and
Wordsworth--in the number of selections that are there given, and rightly
given, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also,
was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of _Lycidas_ was
a touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton was
the one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere the
saneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the modern
critics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was the
standpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged.

"Give me," he says, "a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it,
rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in
them, only smoothness to recommend them!"

And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer.

Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as a
gloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, "Am I
saved? Am I damned?" Let us remember him as staunch to the friends of
his youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when the
world would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how he
delighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. "My greenhouse," he says,
"wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!"
Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to
the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of
bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of
aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that
certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in
these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who
loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the
men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of
him once current in this country than was the real Cowper--the frank,
genial humorist, who wrote "John Gilpin," who in his youth "giggled and
made giggle" with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years "laughed and
made laugh" with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh.

To all men there are periods of weariness and depression, side by side
with periods of happiness