the Establishment). In his poem entitled `Hope', he vindicates
the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation
into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism
which gave him his inspiration and his themes. `The Task' has been
as justly called the poem of Methodism as the `Paradise Lost'
has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with
a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy
of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II.,
vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities).

Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith,
as "the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age,
the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface
of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment
which had long ceased to flow."

The greatest things in this world are often done by those
who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true
of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission
he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it.
And so temporal are the world's standards, in the best of times,
that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until
long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did
are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.

"Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly
Down to towered Camelot: