preceding passage, and that, except the fifth book, which is rather of a political aspect, the whole has one tendency, to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue.”  A regular plan, assuredly, The Task has not.  It rambles through a vast variety of subjects, religious, political, social, philosophical, and horticultural, with as little of method as its author used in taking his morning walks.  Nor as Mr. Benham has shown, are the reflections, as a rule, naturally suggested by the preceding passage.  From the use of a sofa by the gouty to those, who being free from gout, do not need sofas,—­and so to country walks and country life is hardly a natural transition.  It is hardly a natural transition from the ice palace built by a Russian despot, to despotism and politics in general.  But if Cowper deceives himself in fancying that there is a plan or a close connexion of parts, he is right as to the existence of a pervading tendency.  The praise of retirement and of country life as most friendly to piety and virtue, is the perpetual refrain of The Task, if not its definite theme.  From this idea immediately now the best and the most popular passages:  those which please apart from anything peculiar to a religious school; those which keep the poem alive; those which have found their way into the heart of the nation, and intensified the taste for rural and domestic happiness, to which they most winningly appeal.  In these Cowper pours out his inmost feelings, with the liveliness of exhilaration, enhanced by contrast with previous misery.  The pleasures of the country and of home, the walk, the garden, but above all the “intimate delights” of the winter evening, the snug parlour, with its close-drawn curtains shutting out the stormy night, the steaming and bubbling tea-urn, the cheerful circle, the book read aloud, the newspaper through which we look out into the unquiet world, are painted by the writer with a heartfelt enjoyment, which infects the reader.  These are not the joys of a hero, nor are they the joys of an Alcaeus “singing amidst the clash of arms, or when he had moored on the wet shore his storm-tost barque.”  But they are pure joys, and they present themselves in competition with those of Ranelagh and the Basset Table, which are not heroic or even masculine, any more than they are pure.

The well-known passages at the opening of The Winter Evening, are the self-portraiture of a soul in bliss—­such bliss as that soul could know—­and the poet would have found it very difficult to depict to himself by the utmost effort of his religious imagination any paradise which he would really have enjoyed more.

    Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
  And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
  Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
  So let us welcome peaceful evening in.