While every suppliant voice to Heaven applies,
The prow swift wheeling, to the westward flies;
Twelve sailors, on the foremast who depend,
High on the platform of the top ascend:
Fatal retreat! for while the plunging prow
Immerges headlong in the wave below,

Down pressed by watery weight the bowsprit bends,
And from above the stem deep crashing rends:
Beneath her bow the floating ruins lie;
The foremast totters, unsustained on high.
And now the ship, forelifted by the sea,
Hurls the tall fabric backward o'er her lee,
While, in the general wreck, the faithful stay
Drags the maintopmast by the cap away:
Flung from the mast, the seamen strive in vain
Through hostile floods their vessel to regain;
Weak hope, alas! They buffet long the wave
And grasp at life though sinking to the grave,
Till all exhausted, and bereft of strength,
O'erpowered they yield to cruel fate at length;
The burying waters close around their head,
They sink for ever, numbered with the dead.
Those who remain the weather shrouds embrace,
Nor longer mourn their lost companions' case;
Transfixed with terror at the approaching doom,
Self-pity in their breasts alone has room.

Albert and Rodmond, Palemon and young Arion are together on the mast, firm land is close before their eyes, and they have not a hope of reaching it.

In vain the cords and axes were prepared,
For every wave now smites the quivering yard;
High o'er the ship they throw a dreadful shade,
Then on her burst in terrible cascade,
Across the foundered deck o'erwhelming roar,
And foaming, swelling, bound upon the shore.
Swift up the mounting billow now she flies,
Her shattered top half buried in the skies;
Borne o'er a latent reef the hull impends
Then thundering on the marble crag descends.
Her ponderous bulk the dire concussion feels,
And o'er upheaving surges wounded reels-
Again she plunges! Hark! A second shock
Bilges the splitting vessel on the rock.
Down on the Vale of Death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes
In wild despair, while yet another stroke
With strong convulsion rends the solid oak.
Ah, Heaven!-behold her crashing ribs divide!
She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruins o'er the tide.

Thirty seamen who clung to the rigging of the mainmast are dashed on a broken crag, caught in the oozy tangles, and battle in vain against the billows. Three, with Palemon, leave the deck on a rude raft; one only is thrown alive on shore. Rodmond in sinking grasps at Albert and draws him beneath the waves, his last thoughts and his last prayer are for his wife and child. Five only remain clinging to the mast as it drives shoreward, one of them Arion. A billow overwhelms them, tearing away the two who are next Arion.

Another billow bursts in boundless roar, Arion sinks, and memory views no more.

But his sense returns to the confusion of the wreck.

Those two who scramble on the adjacent rocks

Their faithless hold no longer can retain.
They sink o'erwhelmed, and never rise again.

Three only, Arion being one, attain the shore, and find that it was Palemon who had escaped alive from the raft. Scarcely alive,

While yet afloat, on some resisting rock

His ribs were dashed, and fractured with the shock;
Heart-piercing sight! those cheeks so late arrayed
In beauty's bloom are pale with mortal shade,
Distilling blood his lovely breast o'erspread
And clogged the golden tresses of his head.

Voice still was left him; the portrait of Anna hung from his neck, the one thing he had sought to save. He poured his last thoughts into Arion's ear, and died as he uttered the words, "All thoughts of happiness on earth are vain." The poem then ends with the lament of Arion, and his resignation to the will of God. The Greek country people come down to the coast,

-behold the waves o'erspread

With shattered rafts and corpses of the dead;
Three still alive, benumbed and faint they find
In mournful silence on a rock reclined.
The generous natives, moved with social pain,
The feeble strangers in their arms sustain ;
With pitying sighs their hapless lot deplore.
And lead them trembling from the fatal shore.

These are the last lines of William Falconer's "Shipwreck," but there follows an "Occasional Elegy " which tells that tidings of the wreck, sent in a letter from Arion, caused Anna to pine and die:

A longer date of woe, the widowed wife
Her lamentable lot afflicted bore;

Yet both were rescued from the chains of life
Before Arion reached his native shore.

The rest is a dirge for the drowned sailors.

Charles Churchill's "Rosciad" of nearly the same date as Falconer's "Shipwreck "-it was published one year earlier, in March, 1761, when its author's age was thirty-was a metrical satire on the actors of his day that tried each by the standard of unaffected truth which Garrick had set up. It closed with hearty recognition of the genius of the true artist.

When in the features all the soul's portrayed,
And passions such as Garrick's are displayed
To me they seem from quickest feelings caught,
Each start is Nature, and each pause is thought.
When Reason yields to Passion's wild alarms,
And the whole state of man is up in arms,
What but a critic could condemn the player
For pausing here when cool sense pauses there?
While working from the heart the fire I trace,
And mark it strongly flaming to the face,

Whilst in each sound I hear the very man,
I can't catch words, and pity those who can.
Let wits, like spiders, from the tortured brain
Finedraw the critic-web with curious pain!
The Gods-a kindness I with thanks must pay-
Have formed me of a coarser kind of clay;
Not stung with envy, nor with pain diseased,
A poor dull creature still with Nature pleased;
Hence to thy praises, Garrick, I agree,

And pleased with Nature must be pleased with thee.

Shakespeare closes the poem by thus deciding among the claimants to the first place among actors:

If manly sense; if Nature linked with Art;

If thorough knowledge of the human heart;
If powers of acting vast and unconfined;

If fewest faults with greatest beauties joined;

If strong expression, and great powers which lie
Within the magic circle of the eye;

If feelings which few hearts, like his, can know,
And which no face so well as his can show
Deserve the preference-Garrick, take the chair:
Nor quit it till thou place an equal there.

There remains a word to be said of James Grainger's "Sugar-Cane," published in 1764, the year of the publication of Goldsmith's "Traveller"-followed in 1770 by his "Deserted Village," which has been given already in another volume of this Library.1 The "Traveller" and "Deserted Village" belong to the midcurrent of thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. They dealt in their own way with essentials; and from Goldsmith and Cowper we rather look forward to Wordsworth than back to the small critics whose influence we still feel in Grainger's "Sugar-Cane." Dr. Grainger began life as an army surgeon during the Scottish rebellion of 1745; afterwards he sold his commission and practised as a physician in London. He had literary tastes that obtained for him the friendship of Dr. Johnson and others, but perhaps interfered with his success in practice. He published a translation of Tibullus not long before he went to the West Indies. When he left London to settle as a physician at St. Christopher's he cured a lady who had an attack of smallpox during the voyage, and afterwards obtained a good position in the island by marrying her daughter. Thus he had become the owner of sugar-plantations when he wrote his poem of "The Sugar-Cane," published in 1764. He was impelled to the production of this West Indian Georgic, because he desired to be guided by the spirit of inspiration

To Fame's eternal dome, where Maro reigns.

So he discusses the soil fit for canes, fallowing, compost, holing of cane lands, alternate holing and the weed-plough, in a fashion not ill-represented by Boswell's story of the reading of "The Sugar-Cane" in manuscript at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. The assembled wits burst out into a laugh when, after much blankverse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph thus: "Now, Muse, let's sing of rats."

1 See "Shorter English Poems," pages 395-398,

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not coloured like his own, and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And worse than all, and most to be deplored,
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat

With stripes that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man? And what man seeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earned.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Just estimation prized above all price,

I had much rather be myself the slave
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home. -Then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave
That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free,
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein

Of all your empire; that where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.

The

Of Cowper in the days before he wrote "The Task" some account has been given in another volume of this Library.1 Lady Austen, the widow of a baronet, had a sister married to a clergyman, living at Clifton, near Olney. She paid a visit to her sister in the summer of 1781, when Cowper, fifty years old, and living at Olney with Mrs. Unwin, was printing his first volume of poems, "Table Talk," &c. She became a delightful friend to Cowper and Mrs. Unwin. Next year Lady Austen took the Olney vicarage as a summer lodging—the vicar was non-resident and the house to let. friends had then adjoining gardens through which they made a way from house to house, and they spent much of their time together. The lively influence of Lady Austen upon Cowper's life was full of health. It was she who tickled his fancy, one evening, with the story of John Gilpin, so that he laughed over it when he had gone to bed, and must needs make a ballad of it in the morning. was she who, during one of their evening readings together, praised blank verse, and wished that he would write a poem in that measure instead of the rhymed couplets of his first volume then recently published. She urged that he could if he would. "But what," he asked, "shall I write about?" "Oh, you can write well upon anything. Write on this sofa," she said playfully. He playfully accepted "The Task," and gave the name of

THE TASK

It

to the work so suggested. It was begun in the summer of 1783, finished in a twelvemonth, and published in June, 1785, by which time Mrs. Unwin's jealousy had obliged him to forego the pleasure of Lady Austen's cheerful friendship. Cowper gives to the First of the Six Books of his chief poem the title of "The Sofa," and begins with his theme.

1 See "Illustrations of English Religion," pages 375-9; 382-5.

I sing the Sofa. I who lately sang

Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand
Escaped with pain from that adventurous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme;
The theme though humble, yet august and proud
The occasion-for the Fair commands the song.

Then he imagines playfully, but not with his happiest playfulness, the development of the sofa, through the chair and settee, from the three-legged stool. Then the verse passes to the restfulness of the sofa, and its use by the invalid.

The Sofa suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb,
Though on a Sofa, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk——

So he is soon off his sofa and out in imagination among the country scenes that surround Olney, free to follow the natural current of his thoughts. Thenceforth Cowper's mind wanders at will through the poem along the lines of thought that interest him most. The sofa typifies his home at Olney with the constant friendship of Mrs. Unwin; at home he is now out of doors, now indoors; carrying with him his thoughts, which extend to all that interests humanity, but are based always on love for an innocent home-life and communion with Nature. He has not left the sofa many minutes before there is kind recollection of his house companion, Mrs. Unwin:

Not such the alert and active. Measure lite By its true worth, the comforts it affords, And theirs alone seems worthy of the name. Good health, and its associate in the most,

Good temper; spirits prompt to undertake,
And not soon spent, though in an arduous task;
The powers of fancy and strong thought are theirs;
Even age itself seems privileged in them
With clear exemption from its own defects.
A sparkling eye beneath a wrinkled front
The veteran shows, and gracing a grey beard
With youthful smiles, descends toward the grave
Sprightly, and old almost without decay.

He starves deservedly at home who does not go out to share the feast ready for all beneath the open sky. The broken votaries of a false pleasure love their life. They fear to die, "yet scorn the purposes for which they live." The innocent are gay, the lark is gay.

But save me from the gaiety of those

Whose headaches nail them to a noonday bed.

The earth's variety indulges the mind "of desultory man, studious of change." There are times when the eye seeks change from neat enclosures to sea-beaten rocks, or the uncultivated stretch of common. The common suggests the story of a heartstricken woman, "Crazy Kate," whose lover died at sea, and the gipsies "loud when they beg, dumb only when they steal." Happy the man who is civilised into a true sense of life.

But though true worth and virtue in the mild
And genial soil of cultivated life

Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there,
Yet not in cities oft: in proud and gay
And gain-devoted cities.

Yet cities are the nurseries of the arts; and so in London

-touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes
A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees
All her reflected features. Bacon there
Gives more than female beauty to a stone,
And Chatham's eloquence to marble lips.
Nor does the chisel occupy alone

The powers of Sculpture, but the style as much;
Each province of her art her equal care.
With nice incision of her guided steel
She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil
So sterile with what charms soe'er she will,
The richest scenery and the loveliest forms.
Where finds Philosophy her eagle eye,
With which she gazes at yon burning disk
Undazzled, and detects and counts his spots?
In London. Where her implements exact,
With which she calculates, computes, and scans
All distance, motion, magnitude, and now
Measures an atom, and now girds a world?
In London. Where has commerce such a mart,
So rich, so thronged, so drained, and so supplied,
As London, opulent, enlarged, and still
Increasing London? Babylon of old

Not more the glory of the earth than she,
A more accomplished world's chief glory now.
She has her praise. Now mark a spot or two
That so much beauty would do well to purge;
And show this queen of cities, that so fair
May yet be foul, so witty yet not wise.
It is not seemly, nor of good report,
That she is slack in discipline; more prompt

To avenge than to prevent the breach of law;
That she is rigid in denouncing death
On petty robbers, and indulges life
And liberty, and ofttimes honour too,
To peculators of the public gold;

That thieves at home must hang, but he that puts

Into his overgorged and bloated purse
The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.
Nor is it well, nor can it come to good,
That, through profane and infidel contempt
Of Holy Writ, she has presumed to annul
And abrogate, as roundly as she may,
The total ordinance and will of God;
Advancing Fashion to the post of Truth,
And centering all authority in modes
And customs of her own, till Sabbath rites
Have dwindled into unrespected forms,
And knees and hassocks are well-nigh divorced.

God made the country, and man made the town:
What wonder then that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threatened in the fields and groves?

"There is a public mischief in your mirth," says Cowper to the city; and ending with this thought the First Book of "The Task," in the Second Book, which he calls "The Time-piece" and opens with the passage above quoted in contrast to Dr. Grainger's writing upon slaves, he points with deep religious earnestness to what he regards as the worst evils of the time before the outburst of the French Revolution. He called this book "The Time-piece," in the first instance because the clock on the mantelpiece is a familiar companion of the sofa, like it an essential part of home-life. But he gave that title to so earnest a book as this because the course of time suggested to his mind the coming of judgment. He points to a hurricane in Jamaica, to a great fog over Europe in 1783, to the great earthquake at Messina in 1782. There

ancient towers

And roofs embattled high, the gloomy scenes
Where beauty oft and lettered worth consume
Life in the unproductive shades of death,
Fall prone; the pale inhabitants come forth,
And, happy in their unforeseen release
From all the rigours of restraint, enjoy
The terrors of the day that sets them free.
Who then that has thee would not hold thee fast,
Freedom! whom they that lose thee, so regret,
That even a judgment making way for thee
Seems in their eyes a mercy, for thy sake.

Seeing judgments in these things upon others,

where

--none are clear

And none than we more guilty,

Cowper bade England tremble at her escape, and dwelt upon the happiness of those who see a God employed "in all the good and ill that chequer life." It is here that Cowper exclaims:

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country! and, while yet a nook is left
Where English minds and manners may be found,
Shall be constrained to love thee. Though thy clime
Be fickle, and thy year, most part, deformed
With dripping rains, or withered by a frost,

I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies
And fields without a flower, for warmer France
With all her vines; nor for Ausonia's groves
Of golden fruitage, and her myrtle bowers.
To shake thy senate, and from heights sublime
Of patriot eloquence to flash down fire
Upon thy foes, was never meant my task
But I can feel thy fortunes, and partake
Thy joys and sorrows with as true a heart
As any thunderer there. And I can feel
Thy follies too, and with a just disdain
Frown at effeminates, whose very looks
Reflect dishonour on the land I love.
How, in the name of soldiership and sense,

Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth
And tender as a girl, all essenced o'er

With odours, and as profligate as sweet,
Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath,

And love when they should fight,-when such as these
Presume to lay their hand upon the ark

Of her magnificent and awful cause?
Time was when it was praise and boast enough
In every clime, and travel where we might,
That we were born her children; praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother tongue,
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.
Farewell those honours, and farewell with them
The hope of such hereafter! They have fallen
Each in his field of glory: one in arms,
And one in council-Wolfe upon the lap
Of smiling Victory that moment won,
And Chatham, heart-sick of his country's shame!
They made us many soldiers. Chatham still
Consulting England's happiness at home,
Secured it by an unforgiving frown

If any wronged her. Wolfe, where'er he fought,
Put so much of his heart into his act,
That his example had a magnet's force,
And all were swift to follow whom all loved.
Those suns are set. Oh rise some other such!

Or all that we have left is empty talk
Of old achievements, and despair of new.

Then follows satire upon the effeminacy of the day, blended with expression of the poet's sense of his

vocation :

Studious of song,

And yet ambitious not to sing in vain,

I would not trifle merely, though the world Be loudest in their praise who do no more.

If the poet speak in vain, what does the preacher? Here Cowper joins the throng of poets who have again and again set forth contrasted pictures of the