widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story of John Gilpin and called for a ballad on the subject.  She also urged him to write a long poem in blank verse; and when he demanded a subject, she whimsically suggested the sofa, which was a new article of furniture at that time.  Cowper immediately wrote “The Sofa,” and, influenced by the poetic possibilities that lie in unexpected places, he added to this poem from time to time, and called his completed work The Task.  This was published in 1785, and the author was instantly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age.  The last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death mercifully ended the struggle in 1800.  His last poem, “The Castaway,” is a cry of despair, in which, under guise of a man washed overboard in a storm, he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to help.

COWPER’S WORKS.  Cowper’s first volume of poems, containing “The Progress of Error,” “Truth,” “Table Talk,” etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age.  These poems are dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein of pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader.  For Cowper was a humorist, and only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that line alone.

The Task, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper’s longest poem.  Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this work.  Much of it is conventional and “wooden,” to be sure, like much of Wordsworth’s poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the artificial couplets of Johnson’s age, we turn suddenly to Cowper’s description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks, of plowmen and teamsters and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of a better day in poetry: 

    He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
    With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks: 
    News from all nations lumbering at his back. 
    True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
    Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
    Is to conduct it to the destined inn,
    And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on. 
    He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
    Cold and yet cheerful:  messenger of grief
    Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
    To him indifferent whether grief or joy. 
    Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
    Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
    With tears that trickled down the writer’s cheeks
    Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
    Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,
    Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
    His horse and him, unconscious of them all.