393

THE PROSE AND POETIC THEOLOGY OF COWPER.

COWPER presents a study for the reflecting mind in some respects strange and paradoxical. A man of refined and cultivated intellect, kindly affections, and blameless life, devoted to religion, and not merely to religion in the abstract, but to the highest evangelical religion of his day, with all the accessories of freedom from care, pleasing retirement alternated with agreeable society, and the enjoyment of nature, which he so deeply loved-surely, looking at his case from an à priori point of view, we should imagine him one of the happiest of men. And yet, in point of fact, he was, through the greater part of his life, the frequent if not the constant subject of mental gloom and morbidity, and of a melancholy-not of that gentle kind described so gloriously in Milton's "Penseroso," which contains some of the highest elements of human happiness--but dark, depressing, and often evoking the spectre of "wan despair." Religion, so far from alleviating his pitiable state, seems to have fostered it, and instead of sweetening his cup only added to its bitterness; for though the creed which he adopted told him of a finished salvation, it allied that salvation with such terrific views of Deity as rendered it more difficult to lay hold on it than to obey the repudiated law. Indeed, in the popular divinity of his day the reverse of the Gospel procedure seems to have been adopted: the inner spirit of the law-its mildness, innocence, and love were placed in abeyance, while its terrors, curses and condemnation (removed by the Divine Saviour), were retained as the sombre background of its meagre portrait of redeeming mercy, whose gentle voice is lost in the accompanying thunders of Sinai, whose heavenly light is absolutely eclipsed in the surrounding "darkness, fire, and smoke." Such was the system which enthralled this noble spirit; and it has often been a matter of astonishment to the writer, how, in the long and dreary voyage through such fluctuating waters, he was ever able to live on to the advanced age of sixty-nine years.

Still all was not dark: he had one little track of light on the angry sea, leading to the haven of peace. His poetry, very likely considered a vain and unprofitable employment by many of his religious teachers and confreres, true successors of

The bigots of the iron time,

Who deemed the harmless art a crime,

was to him a source of unspeakable consolation, elevating his mind to

juster and happier views of religion. Of this we shall now proceed to point out some striking and pleasing examples.

Thus in his excellent poem entitled "Truth"

Artist attend your brushes and your paint,
Produce them—take a chair, now draw a saint.
Oh sorrowful and sad! the streaming tears
Channel her cheeks-a Niobe appears !*
Is this a saint? Throw tints and all away.
True Piety is cheerful as the day;

Will weep indeed and heave a pitying groan
For others' woes, but smiles upon her own.

Nor does he content himself with asserting this, but shows "the reason why" by propounding a theology very different to what he had been taught

What object has the King of saints in view,
Why falls the Gospel like a gracious dew?
To call up plenty from the teeming earth,
Or curse the desert with a tenfold dearth?
Is it that Adam's offspring may be saved
From servile fear, or be the more enslaved ?
To loose the links that galled mankind before,
Or bind them faster on and add still more?
The free-born Christian has no chain to prove,
Or if a chain the golden one of love.

No fear attends to quench his glowing fires :
What fear he feels his gratitude inspires.
Shall he for such deliverance freely wrought
Recompense ill? he trembles at the thought.
His Master's interest and his own combined
Prompt every movement of his heart and mind;
Thought, word, and deed his liberty evince;
His freedom is the freedom of a prince.

When Cowper penned these lines he was not under the spirit of bondage, but the spirit of adoption.

It is true that his religious theology occasionally breaks out through the poetical, as where he speaks of "justice dropping the red vengeance from her willing hand;" but the poetic has manifestly the predominance.

We find him also rising above the bigotry of his day, which so unceremoniously consigned all heathens to perdition: he not only repudiates the horrible sentiment, but bestows on it a merited castigation.

*

Niobe, the wife of Amphion, king of Thebes, from her extreme sorrow for the loss of her children, has been regarded as the personification of grief and

sadness.

Is virtue then, unless of Christian growth,
Mere fallacy or foolishness, or both?
Ten thousand sages lost in endless woe
For ignorance of what they could not know?
That speech betrays at once a bigot's tongue.
Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong.
Truly not I-the partial light men have,

My creed persuades me, well employed, may save,
While he that scorns the noon-day beam perverse

Shall find the blessing unimproved a curse.

Such enlarged views from one of his school are truly astonishing: how admirably does he add of the heathen philosophers—

Their fortitude and wisdom were a flame

Celestial, though they knew not whence it came ;
Derived from the same Source of light and grace*
That guides the Christian in his swifter race.

In his poem on "Hope," how beautifully does he describe that heavenly visitant

Hope, with uplifted foot set free from earth,
Pants for the place of her ethereal birth,
On steady wings sails through th' immense abyss,
Plucks amaranthine joys from bowers of bliss,
And crowns the soul while yet a mourner here

With wreaths like those triumphant spirits wear.

His poem on 'Charity" is full of the noblest sentiments, and evinces a mind under the influence of pure and soul-enlarging truth when writing. How beautiful are the following lines, and no less true than beautiful,—

The soul whose sight all-quickening grace renews
Takes the resemblance of the good she views,
As diamonds stript of their opaque disguise
Reflect the noontide glory of the skies.+

He goes on to trace charity to its source in redeemning love—
True charity, a plant divinely nursed,

Fed by the love from which it rose at first,
Thrives against hope, and in the rudest scene
Storms but enliven its unfading green.
Exuberant is the shadow it supplies;

Its fruit on earth, its growth above the skies.

To look at Him who formed us and redeemed,
So glorious now, though once so disesteemed-

* The Logos, the True Light, which lighted every man that cometh into the world.

+ A similitude very like this occurs in Swedenborg's "Universal Theology," but we cannot immediately lay our hand on the place.

To see a God stretch forth His human hand

T' uphold the boundless scenes of His command—
To recollect that in a form like ours

He bruised beneath His feet th' infernal powers,
Captivity led captive, rose to claim

The wreath He won so dearly in our name—
That throned above all height He condescends
To call the few that trust in Him His friends-
That in the heaven of heavens that space He deems
Too scanty for the exertion of His beams,
And shines as if impatient to bestow

Life and a kingdom upon worms below.
That sight imparts a never-dying flame,
Though feeble in degree in kind the same.
Like Him the soul thus kindled from above
Spreads wide her arms of universal love,

And still enlarged as she receives the grace
Includes creation in her close embrace.

Were it our object to point out the literary beauties rather than the religious ideas of Cowper's poetry, we could dwell with delight on many parts of "the Sofa" and "the Task," but we can only note currente calamo the masterly delineations of rural life with which they abound, and the ability with which they prove the vast advantage which is to be derived from the simple and innocent tastes inspired by a deep and genuine love of nature, as well as the graphic descriptions which they contain of various elements of true happiness. After expatiating on the great blessings of political liberty, which, "gives the flower of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, and we are weeds without it," he goes on to speak of

A liberty unsung,

By poets and by senators unpraised,

Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers
Of earth and hell confederate take away—

A liberty which persecution, fraud,
Oppression, prisons have no power to bind,
Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more.
'Tis liberty of heart derived from heaven-
Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind.
There is a paradise that fears

No forfeiture, and of its fruits He sends

Large prelibations oft to saints below.
Of these the first in order, and the pledge

And confident assurance of the rest,

Is liberty; a flight into His arms

Ere yet mortality's fine threads give way.

The well-known passage beginning with "He is the freeman whom

the truth makes free," &c., we shall not quote, for although it is the finest he ever penn ed, it is too familiar to need citation. We shall conclude with his splendid apostrophe to the Divine Logos, which exhibits him as the disciple of a higher school than any that existed in his day. Having spoken of

The mind that has been touched from heaven,
And in the school of sacred wisdom taught

To read His wonders in whose thought the world,
Fair as it is, existed ere it was,

he goes on to describe that mind tracing through all nature

The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing

And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.

He then proceeds to his well-known address to the starry heavens, also too well-known to need quotation, and winds up with these almost oracular lines

A voice is heard that mortal ears hear not

Till Thou hast touched them; 'tis the voice of song,

A loud hosanna sent from all Thy works,

Which he that hears it with a shout repeats,

And adds his rapture to the general praise.
In that blest moment Nature, throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The Author of her beauties who, retired
Behind His own creation, works unseen
By the impure, and hears His power denied.
Thou art the Source and Centre of all minds
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word!
From Thee departing they are lost and rove
At random, without honour, hope or peace;
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man,
His high endeavour and his glad success,
His strength to suffer and his will to serve.
But O, Thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.

Thus through his poetry was Cowper "wiser than all his teachers;" and, amidst the forbidding divinity of his studies, it was like Gideon's fleece on which the dew of heaven rested when all was dry and desolate around.

J. B. W.