view with a look of consciousness and attention to etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet.  He is delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the tea-kettle—­No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn.  His walks and arbours are kept clear of worms and snails, with as much an appearance of petit-maitreship as of humanity.  He has some of the sickly sensibility and pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope prided himself in them:  whereas, Cowper affects to be all simplicity and plainness.  He had neither Thomson’s love of the unadorned beauties of nature, nor Pope’s exquisite sense of the elegances of art.  He was, in fact, a nervous man, afraid of trusting himself to the seductions of the one, and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to an intimacy with the other:  but to be a coward, is not the way to succeed either in poetry, in war, or in love!  Still he is a genuine poet, and deserves all his reputation.  His worst vices are amiable weaknesses, elegant trifling.  Though there is a frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness in his manner, he has left a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself.  Such, among others, are his memorable description of the post coming in, that of the preparations for tea in a winter’s evening in the country, of the unexpected fall of snow, of the frosty morning (with the fine satirical transition to the Empress of Russia’s palace of ice), and most of all, the winter’s walk at noon.  Every one of these may be considered as distinct studies, or highly finished cabinet-pieces, arranged without order or coherence.  I shall be excused for giving the last of them, as what has always appeared to me one of the most feeling, elegant, and perfect specimens of this writer’s manner.

      “The night was winter in his roughest mood;
      The morning sharp and clear.  But now at noon
      Upon the southern side of the slant hills,
      And where the woods fence off the northern blast,
      The season smiles, resigning all its rage,
      And has the warmth of May.  The vault is blue,
      Without a cloud, and white without a speck
      The dazzling splendour of the scene below. 
      Again the harmony comes o’er the vale;
      And through the trees I view th’ embattled tow’r,
      Whence all the music.  I again perceive
      The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
      And settle in soft musings as I tread
      The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,
      Whose outspread branches overarch the glade. 
      The roof, though moveable through all its length,