Perhaps Cowper’s greatest accomplishment, though not his greatest work, was a translation of Homer.  He had never considered Pope’s Homer good, and he wished to leave to the world a better.  Cowper’s version was published in 1791, and he fondly believed that it would take the place of Pope’s.  But although Cowper’s may be more correct, it is plain and dry, and while Pope’s is still read and remembered, Cowper’s is forgotten.

Indeed, that Cowper is remembered at all is due more to his shorter poems such as Boadicea and The Wreck of the Royal George, and chiefly, perhaps, to John Gilpin, which in its own way is a treasure that we would not be without.  Other of his shorter poems are full of a simple pathos and gentle humor.  The last he wrote was called The Castaway, and the verse with which it ends describes not unfittingly the close of his own life.  For his mind sank ever deeper into the shadow of madness until he died in April 1800—­

    “No voice divine the storm allayed,
        No light propitious shone;
    When, snatched from all effectual aid,
        We perished, each alone: 
    But I beneath a rougher sea,
    And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.”

Cowper was never a power in our literature, but he was a forerunner, “the forerunner of the great Restoration of our literature."* And unlike most forerunners he was popular in his own day.  And although it is faint, like the scent of forgotten rose leaves, his poetry still keeps a charm and sweetness for those who will look for it.

Macaulay.

Chapter LXXIV WORDSWORTH—­THE POET OF NATURE

COWPER was as a straw blown along the path; he had no force in himself, he showed the direction of the wind.  Now we come to one who was not only a far greater poet, but who was a force in our literature.  This man was William Wordsworth.  He was the apostle of simplicity, the prophet of nature.  He sang of the simplest things, of the common happenings of everyday life, and that too a simple life.

His desire was to choose words only which were really used by men in everyday talk, “and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination.”

He chose to sing of humble life because there men’s thoughts and feelings were more free from art and restraint, there they spoke a plainer, more forceful language, there they were in touch with all that was lasting and true in Nature.  Here then, you will say, is the poet for us, the poet who tells of simple things in simple words, such as we can understand.  And yet, perhaps, strange as it may seem, there is no poet who makes less appeal to young minds than does Wordsworth.

In reading poetry, though we may not always understand every word of it, we want to feel the thrill and glamour of it.  And when Wordsworth remembers his own rules and keeps to them there is no glamour, and his simplicity is apt to seem to us mere silliness.