Self-recollection and reproof—­Address to domestic happiness—­Some account of myself—­The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise—­Justification of my censures—­Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher—­The question, what is truth? answered by other questions—­Domestic happiness addressed again—­Few lovers of the country—­My tame hare—­Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden—­Pruning—­Framing—­Greenhouse—­Sowing of flower-seeds—­The country preferable to the town even in the winter—­Reasons why it is deserted at that season—­Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement—­Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis.

It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it.  Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper.  His description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose.  First, he tells us: 

  The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,
  Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,
  And potent to resist the freezing blast;
  For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf,
  Deciduous, when now November dark
  Checks vegetation in the torpid plant,
  Expos’d to his cold breath, the task begins. 
  Warily therefore, and with prudent heed
  He seeks a favour’d spot; that where he builds
  Th’ agglomerated pile his frame may front
  The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back
  Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge
  Impervious to the wind.

Having further prepared the ground: 

  Th’ uplifted frame, compact at every joint,
  And overlaid with clear translucent glass,
  He settles next upon the sloping mount,
  Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure
  From the dash’d pane the deluge as it falls.

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test.  Had The Task been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme.  As it is, he is merely ponderous—­a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence.  In the fragment called Yardley Oak he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton.  But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.  He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it.  “I reckon it,” he wrote in 1781, “among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years.”  So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins’s name till he read about him in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.