мотто on a CLO ск, With a Translation by the Editor. QUÆ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora! Slow comes the hour: its passing speed how great! Forsitan et nostros ducat de marmore vultus MILTONI MANSUS. I shall but need to say be yet my friend: Shall bind my brows-But I shall rest the while. COWPER'S TRANSLATION. THE CONCLUSION. THOUGH it seems unnecessary to enumerate the many public compliments, that have been paid, by a variety of writers, to the poetical excellence of Cowper, I must not fail to notice a private tribute to his merit, which the kindness of a distant friend transmitted to me while these volumes were in the press. In the form of a letter to an accomplished author of Ireland, it comprises a series of extensive observations on the poetry of my departed friend; observations so full of taste and feeling, that I hope the judicious writer will, in a season of leisure, revise, extend, and convert them into a separate monument to the memory of the Poet, whom he is worthy to praise. Being favoured with the liberty of using, in this publication, the manuscript I have mentioned, I shall select from it a passage relating both to Milton, and to Cowper, as an introduction to the proposal in honour of the two illustrious and congenial poets, with which I have already promised to close this address to the public. After After many forcible remarks on the moral spirit of poetry, and a quotation from Lowth on its end and efficacy, the animated critic proceeds in the following words. "The noblest benefits and delights of poetry can be but rarely produced, because all the requisites for producing them so very seldom meet. A vivid mind, and happy imitative power, may enable a poet to form glowing pictures of virtue, and almost produce in himself a short lived enthusiasm of goodness; but although even these transient and factitious movements of mind may serve to produce grand and delightful effusions of poetry, yet when the best of these are compared with the poetic productions of a genuine lover of virtue, a discerning judgment will scarcely fail to mark the difference. A simplicity of conception and expression-a conscious, and therefore unaffected dignity—an instinctive adherence to sober reason, even amid the highest flights; an uniform justness, and consistency of thought, a glowing, yet temperate ardour of feeling; a peculiar felicity, both in the choice and combination of terms, by which even the plainest words acquire the truest character of eloquence, and which is rarely to be found, except where a subject is not only intimately known, but cordially loved; these I conceive are the features peculiar to the real votary of virtue, and which must of course give to his strains a perfection of effect never to be attained by the poet of inferior moral endowments. I believe songs I believe it will be readily granted, that all these qualities were never more perfectly combined than in the poetry of Milton. And I think too there will be little doubt, that the next to him every one of these instances beyond all comparison, is Cowper. The genius of the latter did certainly not lead him to emulate the of the Seraphim. But though he pursues a lower walk of poetry than his great Master, he appears no less the enraptured votary of pure unmixed goodness. Nay perhaps he may in this one respect possess some peculiar excellencies, which may make him seem more the Bard of Christianity. That divine religion infinitely exalts, but it also deeply humbles the mind it inspires. It gives majesty to the thoughts, but it impresses meekness on the manners, and diffuses tenderness through the feelings. It combines sensibility with fortitude-the lowliness of the child, with the magnanimity of the hero. The grandest features of the Christian character, were never more gloriously exemplified than in that spirit, which animates the whole of Milton's' poetry. His own Michael does not impress us with the idea of a purer, or more awful virtue than that, which we feel in every portion of his majestic verse, and he no less happily indicates the source from which his excellence was derived, by the bright beams which he ever and anon reflects upon us from. the Sacred Scriptures. But the milder graces of the Gospel are certainly less apparent. What we behold is so awful it might almost have inspired a wish, that a spirit equally pure and heavenly, might be raised to illustrate with like felicity the more attractive and gentler influences of our divine religion. VOL. II. HHH In |