In his writings generally, but especially in The Task, Cowper, besides being an apostle of virtuous retirement and evangelical piety, is, by his general tone, an apostle of sensibility. The Task, is a perpetual protest not only against the fashionable vices and the irreligion, but against the hardness of the world; and in a world which worshipped Chesterfield the protest was not needless, nor was it ineffective.  Among the most tangible characteristics of this special sensibility is the tendency of its brimming love of humankind to overflow upon animals, and of this there are marked instances in some passages of The Task.

  I would not enter on my list of friends
  (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
  Yet wanting sensibility) the man
  Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

Of Cowper’s sentimentalism (to use the word in a neutral sense), part flowed from his own temperament, part was Evangelical, but part belonged to an element which was European, which produced the Nouvelle Heloise and the Sorrows of Werther, and which was found among the Jacobins in sinister companionship with the cruel frenzy of the Revolution.  Cowper shows us several times that he had been a reader of Rousseau, nor did he fail to produce in his time a measure of the same effect which Rousseau produced; though there have been so many sentimentalists since, and the vein has been so much worked, that it is difficult to carry ourselves back in imagination to the day in which Parisian ladies could forego balls to read the Nouvelle Heloise, or the stony heart of people of the world could be melted by The Task.

In his versification, as in his descriptions, Cowper flattered himself that he imitated no one.  But he manifestly imitates the softer passages of Milton, whose music he compares in a rapturous passage of one of his letters to that of a fine organ.  To produce melody and variety, he, like Milton, avails himself fully of all the resources of a composite language.  Blank verse confined to short Anglo-Saxon words is apt to strike the ear, not like the swell of an organ, but like the tinkle of a musical-box.

The Task made Cowper famous.  He was told that he had sixty readers at the Hague alone.  The interest of his relations and friends in him revived, and those of whom he had heard nothing for many years emulously renewed their connexion.  Colman and Thurlow reopened their correspondence with him, Colman writing to him “like a brother.”  Disciples, young Mr. Rose, for instance, came to sit at his feet.  Complimentary letters were sent to him, and poems submitted to his judgment.  His portrait was taken by famous painters.  Literary lion-hunters began to fix their eyes upon him.  His renown spread even to Olney.  The clerk of All Saints’, Northampton, came over to ask him to write the verses annually appended to the bill of mortality for that parish.  Cowper suggested