Mr. Hayley's life of Cowper. "The noblest benefits and delights of poetry can be but rarely produced, because all the requisites for producing them so 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 shortlived 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 it will be 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, in every one of these instances, beyond all comparison, is Cowper. The genius of the latter did certainly not lead him to emulate the songs 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 excellences 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 and fortitude, the lowliness of the child, and 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. In Cowper, above any poet that ever lived, would such a wish seem to be fulfilled. In his charming effusions we have the same spotless purity, the same elevated devotion, the same vital exercise of every noble and exalted quality of the mind, the same devotedness to the sacred Scriptures, and to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel. The difference is, that instead of an almost reprehensive dignity, we have the sweetest familiarity; instead of the majestic grandeur of the Old Testament, we have the winning graces of the New; instead of those thunders by which angels were discomfited, we have, as it were, the still small voice of Him who was meek and lowly of heart. May we not then venture to assert, that from that spirit of devoted piety, which has rendered both these great men liable to the charge of religious enthusiasm, but which, in truth, raised the minds of both to a kind of happy residence

'In regions mild, of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call earth-

a peculiar character has been derived to the poetry of them both, which distinguishes their compositions from those of almost all the world besides. I have already enumerated some of the superior advantages of a truly virtuous poet, and presumed to state, that these are realized, in an unexampled degree, in Milton and Cowper. That they both owed this eminence to their vivid sense of religion, will, I conceive, need no demonstration, except what will arise to every reader of taste and feeling on examining their works. It will here, I think, be seen at once, that that sublimity of conception, that delicacy of virtuous feeling, that majestic independence of mind, that quick relish for all the beauties of nature, at once so pure and so exquisite, which we find ever occurring in them both, could not have existed in the same unrivalled degree, if their devotion had been less intense, and of course, their minds more dissipated amongst low and distracting objects."

To the above remarks on the poet's character, we cannot forbear subjoining the two following exquisite pictures of

him, one drawn undesignedly by himself, and the other by the Rev. Dr. Randolph, of Bath, on seeing his portrait by Lawrence.

"Nature, exerting an unwearied power,

Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
But seldom (as if fearful of expense)
Vouchsafes to man a poet's just pretence-
Fervency, freedom, Auency of thought,
Harmony, strength, words exquisitely sought;
Fancy, that from the bow that forms the sky,
Brings colours dipt in heaven, that never die;
A soul exalted above earth; a mind

Skilled in the characters that form mankind;
And as the Sun, in rising beauty drest,
Looks to the westward from the dappled east,
And marks, whatever clouds may interpose
Ere yet his race begins, its glorious close
And eye like his, to catch the distant goal;
Or ere the wheels of verse begin to roll,
Like his to shed illuminating rays

On every scene and subject it surveys:
Thus graced, the man asserts a poet's name,
And the world cheerfully admits the claim."

COWPER.

"Sweet Bard, whose mind, thus pictured in thy face,
O'er every feature spreads a nobler grace;
Whose keen but softened eye appears to dart
A look of pity through the human heart:
To search the secrets of man's inward frame;
To weep with sorrow o'er his guilt and shame;
Sweet Bard, with whom, in sympathy of choice,
I've oft-times left the world, at Nature's voice,
To join the song that all the creatures raise
To carol forth their great Creator's praise;
Or, wrapt in visions of immortal day,
Have gazed on Truth in Zion's heavenly way.
Sweet Bard, may this, thine image, all I know,
Or ever may, of Cowper's form below,

Teach one who views it with a Christian's love
To seek and find thee in the realms above."

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REV. DR. RANDOLPH.