profound melancholy, torturing remorse and gloomy foreboding, is a
religion not calculated to lay a powerful grasp upon the imaginations of
mankind. Had Cowper been a Roman Catholic, the same anguish of mind
might have driven him to seek relief in the recesses of some austere
monastery. Had he, like Rousseau, been a theoretical optimist, he would,
like Rousseau, have tortured himself with the conflict between theory
and fact--between the world as it might be and the corrupt and tyrannous
world as it is--and have held that all men were in a conspiracy to rob
him of his peace. The chief article of Rousseau's rather hazy creed was
the duty of universal philanthropy, and Rousseau fancied himself to be
the object of all men's hatred. Similarly, Cowper, who held that the
first duty of man was the love of God, fancied that some mysterious
cause had made him the object of the irrevocable hatred of his Creator.
With such fancies, reason and creeds which embody reason have nothing to
do except to give shape to the instruments of self-torture. The cause of
the misery is the mind diseased. You can no more raze out its rooted
troubles by arguing against the reality of the phantoms which it
generates than cure any other delirium by the most irrefragable logic.

Sainte-Beuve makes some remarks upon this analogy between Rousseau and
Cowper. The comparison suggests some curious considerations as to the
contrast and likeness of the two cases represented. Some personal
differences are, of course, profound and obvious. Cowper was as
indisputably the most virtuous man, as Rousseau the greatest
intellectual power. Cowper's domestic life was as beautiful as
Rousseau's was repulsive. Rousseau, moreover, was more decidedly a
sentimentalist than Cowper, if by sentimentalism we mean that
disposition which makes a luxury of grief, and delights in poring over
its own morbid emotions. Cowper's tears are always wrung from him by
intense anguish of soul, and never, as is occasionally the case with
Rousseau, suggests that the weeper is proud of his excessive tenderness.
Nevertheless, it is probably true, as Mr. Lowell says, that Cowper is
the nearest congener of Rousseau in our language. The two men, of
course, occupy in one respect an analogous literary position. We
habitually assign to Cowper an important place--though of course a
subordinate place to Rousseau--in bringing about the reaction against
the eighteenth-century code of taste and morality.