Bachelor as he was, he sought his chief happiness in the interior sanctities of domestic life. There his gentle spirit was nourished with the aliment drawn from the purest sources of friendship and virtue, and thence his imagination took its flights, not bold, but beautiful, not ascending to the lofty height of Milton’s “great argument,” but holding its graceful way through that middle region of thought, and fancy, and feeling, familiar to the mass of minds in any measure susceptible to the beauties of poetry. The critics of half a century ago, while they hesitated to admit Cowper to that high rank among the great poets, which has been adjudged him by the verdict of posterity, confessed that his works contained many traits of strong and original genius, and a richness of idiomatic phraseology seldom equalled in the English language. Readers of poetry had become so accustomed to the refined diction and polished versification of his predecessors—Addison, Pope, Gray, and Prior—that they were slow to welcome a new aspirant for the bays, who came with a free, unfettered, and even somewhat careless air to claim their homage. He might gather a few humble flowers along the sides of Parnassus, but to think of reaping near its summit was the height of presumption. Yet which of those poets has now so many readers as Cowper? Goldsmith may better compare with him for permanence and extent of interest, so eminently natural is he; but what shall be said of Dryden, earlier, it is true, than the others, but one who had long been considered as having passed into the apotheosis of the _Dii majores_? He may have one reader to five hundred who luxuriate in Cowper’s parlor, alcove, and garden, with the TASK in hand.