still larger measure of its painful sensibilities. In his portrait; by
Romney the brow bespeaks intellect, the features feeling and
refinement, the eye madness. The stronger parts of character, the
combative and propelling forces he evidently lacked from the beginning.
For the battle of life he was totally unfit. His judgment in its
healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his
letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him
incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the
verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it. To the malady
which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English
poets.

At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness
than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In
short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and
God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions
with any saint, in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if
Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good
poetry. But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he
should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the
influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.

The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at
the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the
spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof
of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was
glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in