Beyond this line Cowper does not go, and had no idea of going; he never thinks of lending a soul to material nature as Wordsworth and Shelley do.  He is the poetic counterpart of Gainsborough, as the great descriptive poets of a later and more spiritual day are the counterparts of Turner.  We have said that Cowper’s peasants are genuine as well as his landscape; he might have been a more exquisite Crabbe if he had turned his mind that way, instead of writing sermons about a world which to him was little more than an abstraction, distorted moreover, and discoloured by his religious asceticism.

  Poor, yet industrious, modest, quiet, neat,
  Such claim compassion in a night like this,
  And have a friend in every feeling heart. 
  Warm’d, while it lasts, by labour, all day long
  They brave the season, and yet find at eve,
  Ill clad, and fed but sparely, time to cool. 
  The frugal housewife trembles when she lights
  Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,
  But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys. 
  The few small embers left, she nurses well;
  And, while her infant race, with outspread hands
  And crowded knees sit cowering o’er the sparks,
  Retires, content to quake, so they be warm’d. 
  The man feels least, as more inured than she
  To winter, and the current in his veins
  More briskly moved by his severer toil;
  Yet he too finds his own distress in theirs,
  The taper soon extinguish’d, which I saw
  Dangled along at the cold finger’s end
  Just when the day declined; and the brown loaf
  Lodged on the shelf, half eaten without sauce
  Of savoury cheese, or batter, costlier still: 
  Sleep seems their only refuge:  for, alas’
  Where penury is felt the thought is chained,
  And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few! 
  With all this thrift they thrive not.  All the care
  Ingenious Parsimony takes, but just
  Saves the small inventory, bed and stool,
  Skillet, and old carved chest, from public sale. 
  They live, and live without extorted alms
  from grudging hands:  but other boast have none
  To soothe their honest pride that scorns to beg,
  Nor comfort else, but in their mutual love.

Here we have the plain, unvarnished record of visitings among the poor of Olney.  The last two lines are simple truth as well as the rest.

“In some passages, especially in the second book, you will observe me very satirical.”  In the second book of The Task, there are some bitter things about the clergy, and in the passage pourtraying a fashionable preacher, there is a touch of satiric vigour, or rather of that power of comic description which was one of the writer’s gifts.  But of Cowper as a satirist enough has been said.