Then for purity, what a contrast between these last two. The Bard of Christianity, as he has been called, wrote no line, which, “dying he would wish to blot.” To Cowper the sentiment is more impressively applicable by the suffrage of the public mind, than Thomson, to whom it is applied by Lord Lyttleton—and deservedly so. They both communed with Nature, the one with her minute lights and shades, the other with her grander forms and more striking developments. The imagination of Cowper, like the microscopic glass, detected the shape and tint of the very petal of a flower. That of Thomson ranged with the sweep of the telescope through fields of light, and distant spheres, radiant with beauty and vocal with harmony. Each fulfilled his mission with dignity, propriety, and devotion, causing us to pray _O! si sic omnes!_ But the nineteenth century has produced so much mysticism, such an amount of nebulous metaphysics in poetry and prose, as to make some honest people doubt the lawfulness of their veneration for the standard poets, especially the more intelligible ones, or whether there is any such thing as standard poetry. Coleridge, indeed, is clear, solemn, and sublime, when he approaches nearest to Milton, as in his Sunrise Hymn; and Wordsworth is most natural, perspicuous, and impressive, when he most resembles Cowper; but Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning—what do they mean in half their poetry? Cowper stands almost alone in having nothing to do with the passion of love, which has always figured at such a rate in all sorts of novels, dramas, and poems. It was not because he was destitute of sensibility. His life was a tender sentiment, his heart was formed for friendship; he was even an admirer of the female sex, and he entrusted the happiness of his life to the care and sympathy of female friends; but the romance of the tender passion was beneath the dignity of his Muse, while for real purity of affection, as well as of imagination, no poet has been more distinguished. He possesses the sweetness, if not the grandeur of Milton; and if he does not emulate the song of the Seraphim, who, in their exalted spheres, minister so near the throne of the Eternal, his strain is ever coincident with the thousand choral harmonies of nature and mind around him. In speaking of the influence of the “country” upon his mind, even that country which “God made,” he says, with enthusiasm, “I never framed a wish, or formed a plan, That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss, But there I laid the scene; there early strayed My fancy, ere yet liberty of choice Had found me, or the hope of being free. My very dreams were rural; rural, too, The first born efforts of my youthful muse.”