condition was one of extreme misery, depression, and despair. He thought himself an outcast from the mercy of God. “I seem to myself,” he wrote to a friend, “to be scrambling always in the dark, among rocks and precipices, without a guide, but with an enemy ever at my heels, prepared to push me headlong.” The cloud never lifted; gloom and dejection enshrouded all his later years; a pension of £300 a-year from George III. brought him no pleasure; and he died insane, at East Dereham, in Norfolk, in the year 1800. In the poem of +The Castaway+ he compares himself to a drowning sailor:-- “No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone, When, far from all effectual aid, We perished-- each alone-- But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in blacker gulfs than he.” 12. His greatest work is +The Task+; and the best poem in it is probably “The Winter Evening.” His best-known poem is +John Gilpin+, which, like “The Task,” he wrote at the request of his friend, Lady Austen. His most powerful poem is +The Castaway+. He always writes in clear, crisp, pleasant, and manly English. He himself says, in a letter to a friend: “Perspicuity is always more than half the battle... A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning;” and this direction he himself always carried out. Cowper’s poems mark a new era in poetry; his style is new, and his ideas are new. He is no follower of Pope; Southey compared Pope and Cowper as “formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery.” He is always original, always true-- true to his own feeling, and true to the object he is describing. “My descriptions,” he writes of “The Task,” “are all from nature; not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience.” Everywhere in his poems we find a genuine love of nature; humour and pathos in his description of persons; and a purity and honesty of style that have never been surpassed. Many of his well-put lines have passed into our common stock of everyday quotations. Such are-- “God made the country, and man made the town.” “Variety’s the very spice of life That gives it all its flavour.” “The heart May give a useful lesson to the head, And Learning wiser grow without his books.” “Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have passed away.”