While every suppliant voice to Heaven applies, Down pressed by watery weight the bowsprit bends, 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, 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. 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; 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; 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 Yet both were rescued from the chains of life 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, Whilst in each sound I hear the very man, 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 fewest faults with greatest beauties joined; If strong expression, and great powers which lie If feelings which few hearts, like his, can know, 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, Might never reach me more! My ear is pained, With stripes that Mercy, with a bleeding heart, I had much rather be myself the slave Of all your empire; that where Britain's power 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 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, 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, 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 Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there, Yet cities are the nurseries of the arts; and so in London -touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes The powers of Sculpture, but the style as much; Not more the glory of the earth than she, To avenge than to prevent the breach of law; That thieves at home must hang, but he that puts Into his overgorged and bloated purse God made the country, and man made the town: "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 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, I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth With odours, and as profligate as sweet, And love when they should fight,-when such as these Of her magnificent and awful cause? If any wronged her. Wolfe, where'er he fought, Or all that we have left is empty talk 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 |