was an outdoor as well as
an indoor man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region,
where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was
bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at
once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_
reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of
humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had
given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.
In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator;
of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles
Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new
life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the
keeper of Cowper's conscience, was one of the leaders of the
Evangelicals; and Cowper's first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems,
1782, written under Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in
verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting,
dancing, and theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he
wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of
the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And,
indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He
lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine
delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a
charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic ballad _John
Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,

How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.

At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose,
called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had
appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems chiefly in
the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the book through
twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a
"very extraordinary production." This momentary flash, as of an electric
spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of
their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and
Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, _in
vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national in their work. Burns's
sweet though rugged D