“Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door,
      Pillow and bobbins all her little store;
      Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay,
      Shuffling her threads about the live-long day,
      Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night,
      Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light;
      She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,
      Has little understanding, and no wit,
      Receives no praise; but, though her lot be such,
      (Toilsome and indigent) she renders much;
      Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true—­
      A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew;
      And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes
      Her title to a treasure in the skies.

        O happy peasant!  Oh unhappy bard! 
      His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward;
      He prais’d, perhaps, for ages yet to come,
      She never heard of half a mile from home: 
      He lost in errors his vain heart prefers,
      She safe in the simplicity of hers.”

His character of Whitfield, in the poem on Hope, is one of his most spirited and striking things.  It is written con amore.

        “But if, unblameable in word and thought,
      A man arise, a man whom God has taught,
      With all Elijah’s dignity of tone,
      And all the love of the beloved John,
      To storm the citadels they build in air,
      To smite the untemper’d wall (’tis death to spare,)
      To sweep away all refuges of lies,
      And place, instead of quirks, themselves devise,
      Lama Sabachthani before their eyes;
      To show that without Christ all gain is loss,
      All hope despair that stands not on his cross;
      Except a few his God may have impressed,
      A tenfold phrensy seizes all the rest.”

These lines were quoted, soon after their appearance, by the Monthly Reviewers, to shew that Cowper was no poet, though they afterwards took credit to themselves for having been the first to introduce his verses to the notice of the public.  It is not a little remarkable that these same critics regularly damned, at its first coming out, every work which has since acquired a standard reputation with the public.—­Cowper’s verses on his mother’s picture, and his lines to Mary, are some of the most pathetic that ever were written.  His stanzas on the loss of the Royal George have a masculine strength and feeling beyond what was usual with him.  The story of John Gilpin has perhaps given as much pleasure to as many people as any thing of the same length that ever was written.

His life was an unhappy one.  It was embittered by a morbid affection, and by his religious sentiments.  Nor are we to wonder at this, or bring it as a charge against religion; for it is the nature of the poetical temperament to carry every thing to excess, whether it be love, religion, pleasure, or pain, as we may see in the case of Cowper and of Burns, and to find torment or rapture in that in which others merely find a resource from ennui, or a relaxation from common occupation.