his half-bred cur, and cheered by the fragrance of his short pipe. He
watches the marauding sparrows, and thinks with tenderness of the fate
of less audacious birds; and then pauses to examine the strange fretwork
erected at the mill-dam by the capricious freaks of the frost. Art, it
suggests to him, is often beaten by Nature; and his fancy goes off to
the winter palace of ice erected by the Russian empress. His friend
Newton makes use of the same easily allegorised object in one of his
religious writings; though I know not whether the poet or the divine
first turned it to account. Cowper, at any rate, is immediately diverted
into a meditation on 'human grandeur and the courts of kings.' The
selfishness and folly of the great give him an obvious theme for a
dissertation in the true Rousseau style. He tells us how 'kings were
first invented'--the ordinary theory of the time being that
political--deists added religious--institutions were all somehow
'invented' by knaves to impose upon fools. 'War is a game,' he says, in
the familiar phrase,

'Which were their subjects wise
Kings would not play at.'

But, unluckily, their subjects are fools. In England indeed--for Cowper,
by virtue of his family traditions, was in theory a sound Whig--we know
how far to trust our kings; and he rises into a warmth on behalf of
liberty for which he thinks it right to make a simple-minded apology in
a note. The sentiment suggests a vigorous and indeed prophetic
denunciation of the terrors of the Bastille, and its 'horrid towers and
dungeons.'

There's not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last!

Within five or six years English hearts were indeed welcoming the event
thus foretold as the prospect of a new era of liberty. Liberty, says
Cowper, is the one thing which makes England dear. Were that boon lost,

I would at least bewail it under skies
Milder, amongst a people less austere;
In scenes which, having never known me free,
Would not reproach me with the loss I felt.[20]

So far Cowper was but expressing the sentiments of Rousseau, omitting,
of course, Rousseau's hearty dislike for England. But liberty suggests
to Cowper a different and more solemn vein of thought. There are worse
dungeons, he remembers, than the Bastille, and a slavery compared with
which that of the victims of French tyranny is a trifle--

There is yet a liberty unsung
By poets, and