Part 68 (2/2)

”Yet much as nature I respect, I ventured once to break (As you perhaps may recollect) Her precept for your sake;

”And when your linnet on a day, Pa.s.sing his prison door, Had fluttered all his strength away And panting pressed the floor,

”Well knowing him a sacred thing Not destined to my tooth, I only kissed his ruffled wing And licked the feathers smooth.

”Let my obedience then excuse My disobedience now, Nor some reproof yourself refuse From your aggrieved Bow-wow;

”If killing birds be such a crime (Which I can hardly see),

What think you, sir, of killing Time With verse addressed to me?”

As Cowper's life went on, the terrible lapses into insanity became more frequent, but his sweet and kindly temper won him many friends, and he still wrote a great deal. And among the many things he wrote, his letters to his friends were not the least interesting. They are among the best letters in our language.

Perhaps Cowper's greatest accomplishment, though not his greatest work, was a translation of Homer. He had never considered Pope's Homer good, and he wished to leave to the world a better.

Cowper's version was published in 1791, and he fondly believed that it would take the place of Pope's. But although Cowper's may be more correct, it is plain and dry, and while Pope's is still read and remembered, Cowper's is forgotten.

Indeed, that Cowper is remembered at all is due more to his shorter poems such as Boadicea and The Wreck of the Royal George, and chiefly, perhaps, to John Gilpin, which in its own way is a treasure that we would not be without. Other of his shorter poems are full of a simple pathos and gentle humor. The last he wrote was called The Castaway, and the verse with which it ends describes not unfittingly the close of his own life. For his mind sank ever deeper into the shadow of madness until he died in April 1800--

”No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone; When, s.n.a.t.c.hed from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.”

Cowper was never a power in our literature, but he was a forerunner, ”the forerunner of the great Restoration of our literature.”* And unlike most forerunners he was popular in his own day. And although it is faint, like the scent of forgotten rose leaves, his poetry still keeps a charm and sweetness for those who will look for it.

*Macaulay.

Chapter LXXIV WORDSWORTH--THE POET OF NATURE

COWPER was as a straw blown along the path; he had no force in himself, he showed the direction of the wind. Now we come to one who was not only a far greater poet, but who was a force in our literature. This man was William Wordsworth. He was the apostle of simplicity, the prophet of nature. He sang of the simplest things, of the common happenings of everyday life, and that too a simple life.

His desire was to choose words only which were really used by men in everyday talk, ”and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination.”

He chose to sing of humble life because there men's thoughts and feelings were more free from art and restraint, there they spoke a plainer, more forceful language, there they were in touch with all that was lasting and true in Nature. Here then, you will say, is the poet for us, the poet who tells of simple things in simple words, such as we can understand. And yet, perhaps, strange as it may seem, there is no poet who makes less appeal to young minds than does Wordsworth.

In reading poetry, though we may not always understand every word of it, we want to feel the thrill and glamour of it. And when Wordsworth remembers his own rules and keeps to them there is no glamour, and his simplicity is apt to seem to us mere silliness.

When we are very young we cannot walk alone, and are glad of a kindly helping hand to guide our footsteps. In learning to read, as in learning to walk, it is at first well to trust to a guiding hand. And in learning to read poetry it is at first well to use selections chosen for us by those wiser than ourselves. Later, when we can go alone, we take a man's whole work, and choose for ourselves what we will most love in it. And it is only by making use of this power of choice that we can really enjoy what is best. But of all our great writers Wordsworth is perhaps the last in the reading of whose works we willingly go alone. He is perhaps the writer who gains most by being read in selections.

Indeed, for some of us there never comes a time when we care to read his whole works.

For if we take his whole works, at times we plow through pages of dry-as-dust argument where there is never a glimmer of that beauty which makes poetry a joy, till we grow weary of it. Then suddenly there springs to our eye a line of truest beauty which sets our senses atingle with delight, and all our labor is more than paid. And if our great poets were to be judged by single lines or single stanzas we may safely say that Wordsworth would be placed high among them. He is so placed, but it is rather by the love of the few than by the voice of the many.

I am not trying to make you afraid of reading Wordsworth, I am only warning you that you must not go to him expecting to gather flowers. You must go expecting to and willing to dig for gold.

Yet although Wordsworth gives us broad deserts of prose in his poetry, he himself knew the joy of words in lovely sequence.

He tells us that when he was ten years old, or less, already his mind--

”With conscious pleasure opened to the charm Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet For their own sakes, a pa.s.sion, and a power; And phrases pleased me chosen for delight, For pomp, or love.”*

<script>