Some fickle creatures boast a soul
  True as a needle to the pole,
    Their humour yet so various—­
  They manifest their whole life through
  The needle’s deviations too,
    Their love is so precarious.

  The great and small but rarely meet
  On terms of amity complete;
    Plebeians must surrender,
  And yield so much to noble folk,
  It is combining fire with smoke,
    Obscurity with splendour.

  Some are so placid and serene
  (As Irish bogs are always green)
    They sleep secure from waking;
  And are indeed a bog, that bears
  Your unparticipated cares
    Unmoved and without quaking.

  Courtier and patriot cannot mix
  Their heterogeneous politics
    Without an effervescence,
  Like that of salts with lemon juice,
  Which does not yet like that produce
    A friendly coalescence.

Faint presages of Byron are heard in such a poem as The Shrubbery, and of Wordsworth in such a poem as that To a Young Lady.  But of the lyrical depth and passion of the great Revolution poets Cowper is wholly devoid.  His soul was stirred by no movement so mighty, if it were even capable of the impulse.  Tenderness he has, and pathos as well as playfulness; he has unfailing grace and ease; he has clearness like that of a trout-stream.  Fashions, even our fashions, change.  The more metaphysical poetry of our time has indeed too much in it, besides the metaphysics, to be in any danger of being ever laid on the shelf with the once admired conceits of Cowley; yet it may one day in part lose, while the easier and more limpid kind of poetry may in part regain, its charm.

The opponents of the Slave Trade tried to enlist this winning voice in the service of their cause.  Cowper disliked the task, but he wrote two or three anti-Slave-Trade ballads. The Slave Trader in the Dumps, with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre, justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly fit for art.

If the cistern which had supplied The Task was exhausted, the rill of occasional poems still ran freely, fed by a spring which, so long as life presented the most trivial object or incident could not fail.  Why did not Cowper go on writing these charming pieces which he evidently produced with the greatest facility?  Instead of this, he took, under an evil star, to translating Homer.  The translation of Homer into verse is the Polar Expedition of literature, always failing, yet still desperately renewed.  Homer defies modern reproduction.  His primeval simplicity is a dew of the dawn which can never be re-distilled.  His primeval savagery is almost equally unpresentable.  What civilized poet can don the barbarian sufficiently to revel, or seem to revel, in the ghastly details of carnage, in hideous wounds described with surgical gusto, in the butchery of captives in cold blood, or even in