Introduction to Browning | Page 9

Pope, if not of THE Pope.
To notice but a few of the influences at work: Thomson sang of the

Seasons, and invited attention to the beauties of
the natural world, to
which the previous generation had been blind and indifferent. Bishop
Percy published his `Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', thus
awakening a new interest in the old ballads which had sprung from the
heart of the people, and contributing much to free poetry from the yoke
of the conventional and the artificial, and to work a revival of natural
unaffected feeling. Thomas Tyrwhitt edited in a scholarly and
appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. James
McPherson published what he claimed to be translations from the
poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal.
Whether genuine or not, these
poems indicated the tendency of the time. In Scotland, the old ballad
spirit, which had continued to exist with a vigor but little abated by the
influence of the artificial, mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up
and intensified in the songs of him "who walked in glory and in joy,

following his plow, along the mountain-side", and who is entitled to a
high rank among the poetical reformers of the age.
It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy's day, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good
man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in
his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who
ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering
contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was
shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism.
But in the face of all opposition, and aided by the yearning for literary
liberty that was abroad, the old ballads grew more and more into favor.
The influence of this folklore was not confined to England. It extended
across the sea, and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and
Goethe
and Schiller.
Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century,
came the
great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys and Whitefield; and
of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper was a direct product. But
the two revivals were co-radical, -- one was not derived from the other.
The long-suppressed
spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert
themselves in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound
asleep as the Muses.

Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival, the
Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within the
Establishment). In his poem entitled `Hope', he vindicates the memory
of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of
White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his
inspiration and his themes. `The Task' has been as justly called the
poem of Methodism as the `Paradise Lost' has been called the epic of
Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the
utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established
Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the
clergy and the universities).
Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith, as
"the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age, the apostle of
nature. He opened beneath the arid surface
of a polished but soulless
society, a fountain of sentiment which had long ceased to flow."
The greatest things in this world are often done by those
who do not
know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper.
He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his
contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the
world's standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not
generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the
results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace
the original impulses.
"Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a
song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly
Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,

Listening, whispers, 'Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott."
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman
entitled

`The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture
on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not
name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the
smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something
must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be
found not educated under its influence."
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness,
was
"Strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation",
and who
"Testified this solemn truth, while