BOOKS.

THE POEMS OF WILLIAM COWPER.*

IT is always a matter of convenience, for purposes of ready reference, to have the whole of the works of a poet in a single -volume with a good index, and for that reason alone Mr. Bailey's handsome volume, with its large and readable type, would be * The Poems of orer. Edited by J. C. Bailey. London: Methuen ead CO. [108. Gd. netl

very welcome. But it has other and more Important merits. The text has been subjected to a painstaking revision by the editor, who has collated all previous editions and all accessible manuscript sources, so that for the first time we have a critical apparatus for Cowper's poetry; and the practical result is in not a few cases an improved reading; in one or two, sense instead of nonsense by repunctuation ; and in one, an additional stanza—the fourth in the passage quoted below—which restores the balance of stanzas to a poem, the touching lines "to Mary," which for private reasons had been mutilated by Cowper's first editors. The reader will at once perceive how much this beautiful poem is improved by the recovered deliberateness with which the poet describes in turn, and with the same loving emphasis, the change that has passed upon the hair, the hands, the limbs of his aged friend :—

" Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, Are still more lovely in my sight Than golden beams of orient light.

For could I view nor them nor thee, What sight worth seeing could I see ? The sun would rise in vain for me.

Partakers of the sad decline, Thy hands their little force resign; Yet, gently pressed, press gently mine.

And then I feel that still I hold A richer store ten thousand fold Than misers fancy in their gold.

Such feebleness of limb thou provest, That now at every step thou movest Upheld by two, yet still thou lovest ; And still to love, though prest with ill, In wintry age to feel no chill, With me is to be lovely still."

Mr. Bailey's introduction and notes are full of good things. He is evidently one of those people, fewer to-day than they should be, for whom Cowper is still a poet; who can place themselves at his point of view, and feel the freshness that he felt in the quiet Olney landscape, without being distressed by the too Miltonic blank verse in which he expressed his vision. He quotes, for example, the beautiful passage from the first book of "The Task" (lines 109-180) in which Cowper makes the transition from his mock-heroic opening—apologising for so long a quotation by the remark that "the world is so strangely constituted that there are people who will read introductions to poems but will not read the poems themselves "—and then comments upon it in the following happy manner :— " Nothing quite like these descriptive passages existed before in our own, or, so far as I know, in any other language. They are, as Cowper claims, absolutely sincere ; he has himself, with his own eye, seen everything he describes : it is a great deal more than other men see ; and he has found a great deal more in it. And not only his observation but his feelings are entirely his own; the whole is what the French call Wm: the personal note is everywhere, though linked, as it must be in all art that is to count, with the note of the universal. The feeling to which the poet gives utterance is his own, but not all or only his own : it is representative as well as personal; he speaks not as an isolated individual but as the spokesman of the human race. Of its feeling only, of course, not of its thought ; no one must look to Cowper for anything like profound thought; he is too far away from all intellectual influences for that, too content behind the narrow walls of his self-chosen cloister. His function is the interpreta- tion of some of our best and purest feelings; as we read him we are conscious that we too have experienced such feelings as his, though less in degree and of less fine quality; he expresses for us what we cannot express for ourselves : that is his first work ; and the second is to lead us on and up to new and higher emotions of the same order, of which his poetry brings us our first revelation. Many poets have failed in the second task because they have ignored or disdained the first. In Cowper we begin with the familiar, with what belongs to us all, and are carried, almost without knowing it, into the world that was his only, and not ours,—the poetic world of his own creation and consecration."

Perhaps it is Cowper's observation, even more than his feeling, though the lines on his mother's picture will always keep a place in anthologies, which gives him his permanent rank among English poets ; his sincere observation and the sincerity of his manner of expressing it at his best. There is far too much, indeed, for our modern taste of such writing

as this :—

" As one who, long in thickets and in brakes Entangled, wends now this way and now that His devious course uncertain, seeking home; Or having long in miry ways been foiled And sore discomfited, from slough to slough Plunging, and half-despairing of escape, If chance at length,"— verse written with the "Paradise Lost" open in front of the

poet; but let the reader press on, and he will come suddenly upon vignettes as exquisite as that of the threshers :—

"Wide flies the chaff ;

The rustling straw sends up a frequent mist Of atoms sparkling in the noonday beam " ;

or the woodman's dog:—

" Close behind his heel Now creeps he slow; and now with many a frisk Wide-scampering snatches up the drifted snow With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout : Then shakes his powdered coat, and barks for joy " ;

or the grove at evening :— "At eve The moonbeam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light we wish, Birds warbling all the music"; Or the robin in the winter landscape The redbreast warbles still, but is content With slender notes, and more than half suppressed; Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes From many a twig the pendent drops of ice That tinkle in the withered leaves below."

Perhaps this last is the most exquisite of all the landscape studies in "The Task." The casual reader can appreciate the close observation and the sincerity of the description, and feel the charm of the picture; while the critic cannot but be lost in admiration of the skill with which the words are moulded to the poet's purpose. He remarks how, by properly artistic means, such as a repetition of thin vowel sounds, "still," flitting," "twig," "tinkle," "withered," "content," "slender," "pendent," an effect is produced of silence and solitude, while the motion of the robin is exactly conveyed by the word "flitting."

It would be pleasant to follow Mr. Bailey through hip introduction, which is the most sympathetic study of Cowper's poetry we have seen, agreeing here, and there making a dis- tinction; but the sixty pages are so full of matter that the temptation must be resisted. As one more example of the penetration of his criticism, we will quote his remarks on "The Loss of the Royal George," a poem which is a standing puzzle to the critics, from the apparently unaccountable superiority of the result to the ingredients of which it was composed. Mr. Leslie Stephen's recipe for the poem is well known: "Given an ordinary newspaper paragraph about wreck or battle, turn it into the simplest possible language. Do not introduce a single metaphor or figure of speech, indulge in none but the most obvious of all reflections—as, for example, that when a man is once drowned he won't win any more battles—and produce as the result a copy of verses which nobody can ever read without instantly knowing them by heart," Mr. Bailey is not content merely to state the problem; he attempts a solution :—

"In the tale Cowper had to tell there is no heroism, and no glory. He had nothing to help him to move us but the awful suddenness of the fate of four hundred men. There is no action;

the whole position is one purely passive He has pressed into his service all that seemed most in his way ; indeed, all that seemed most ineffective. The calm, the security of home waters, the admiral at his desk,is just what is made to produce the effect. But it is more than that. The secret of the success lies in no detail, but in the whole treatment. Few poems in any language illustrate better the power of great verse. It would be nothing in a paraphrase ; it is very little in Cowper's Latin translation. But no sooner have we heard that rich and sonorous opening 'Toll for the brave,' like the great bell of some cathedral, than we are carried away and up above ourselves in no ordinary mood. And there the poet keeps us all through by his noble and serious simplicity, in no state of rhetorical excitement, but rather in that quiet gravity of thought which befits the presence of death in life."

That is very well said. Perhaps the analysis might be carried somewhat further. As the "rich and sonorous opening" suggests, the poem is a dirge, as Cowper himself called it; and its peculiar effect is the effect of a dirge. It was indeed written, as its inscription tells us, "to the march in Scipio." The intention of the poem, therefore, is not to make reflections, obvious or otherwise, but to emphasise the bare fact of the loss. And this it does by the slow repetition of dirge-like cadences, saying the same thing in various ways, ever and over : "The brave that are no more " ; "Eight hundred of the brave " ; "Down went the Royal George"; "Brave Kempenfelt is gone"; "His last sea fight is fought " ; Kempenfelt is gone " ; "His victories are o'er." If we occasionally find something to add to Mr. Bailey's criticism, it is on this technical side. He says of the " Castaway " : "The easy stanza in which it is composed is not the most effective for so terrible a theme; but no neglect of the more artificial means of producing poetic effect could detract from the result where the story itself is told with an energy of concentra- tion that comes straight from an experience written in burning letters on the poor poet's heart and brain." Well, certainly,

the " Castaway " has "energy of concentration," but no small part of the "terrible" effeot of the poem is precisely due to "the easy stanza" in which it is composed, which gives, and we may be sure was chosen by the poet's instinct in order to

give, a sense of natural and inevitable fate, both in the case of the poor shipwrecked sailor and the spiritual castaway. The poet's eyes are dry ; he describes almost without comment, except that he is careful to point out that no one in either case was to blame :—

" He shouted: nor his friends had failed To check the vessel's course, But so the furious blast prevailed That, pitiless perforce,

They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind.

Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he

Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, on such a sea,

Alone could rescue them; Yet bitter felt it still to die Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid, We perished each alone : But I beneath a rougher sea, And 'whelmed in deeper gulfs than he."

We must not omit to mention that Mr. Bailey includes in his volume some five-and-thirty unpublished letters of tbe poet, and amongst its embellishments two beautiful drawings by William Blake to illustrate the "Winter Evening." We have no doubt that his book will become the standard edition of Cowper.