CHAPTER VI.
Short Poems and Translations

CHAPTER VII.
The Letters

CHAPTER VIII.
Close of Life




COWPER.


CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE.

Cowper is the most important English poet of the period between Pope
and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley,
which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution.
As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to
nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of
sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social
system, he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the
revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all. As a
sentimentalist he presents a faint analogy to Rousseau, whom in natural
temperament he somewhat resembled. He was also the great poet of the