Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival, the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within the Establishment). In his poem entitled ‘Hope’, he vindicates the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. ‘The Task’ has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the ‘Paradise Lost’ has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities). Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith, as “the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age, the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment which had long ceased to flow.” The greatest things in this world are often done by those who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the world’s standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses. “Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly Down to towered Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers, ‘Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.” John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled ‘The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”, whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence.” Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was “Strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation”, and who “Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,-- Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created.” John Keats, in his poem entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’, has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues:--