He remarks, with a passing recollection of his last sermon, that we are all shadows; but turns to note the cattle cowering behind the fences; the labourer carving the haystack; the woodman going to work, followed by his half-bred cur, and cheered by the fragrance of his short pipe. He watches the marauding sparrows, and thinks with tenderness of the fate of less audacious birds; and then pauses to examine the strange fretwork erected at the mill-dam by the capricious freaks of the frost. Art, it suggests to him, is often beaten by Nature; and his fancy goes off to the winter palace of ice erected by the Russian empress. His friend Newton makes use of the same easily allegorised object in one of his religious writings; though I know not whether the poet or the divine first turned it to account. Cowper, at any rate, is immediately diverted into a meditation on 'human grandeur and the courts of kings.' The selfishness and folly of the great give him an obvious theme for a dissertation in the true Rousseau style. He tells us how 'kings were first invented'--the ordinary theory of the time being that political--deists added religious--institutions were all somehow 'invented' by knaves to impose upon fools. 'War is a game,' he says, in the familiar phrase, 'Which were their subjects wise Kings would not play at.' But, unluckily, their subjects are fools. In England indeed--for Cowper, by virtue of his family traditions, was in theory a sound Whig--we know how far to trust our kings; and he rises into a warmth on behalf of liberty for which he thinks it right to make a simple-minded apology in a note. The sentiment suggests a vigorous and indeed prophetic denunciation of the terrors of the Bastille, and its 'horrid towers and dungeons.' There's not an English heart that would not leap To hear that ye were fallen at last! Within five or six years English hearts were indeed welcoming the event thus foretold as the prospect of a new era of liberty. Liberty, says Cowper, is the one thing which makes England dear. Were that boon lost, I would at least bewail it under skies Milder, amongst a people less austere; In scenes which, having never known me free, Would not reproach me with the loss I felt.[20] So far Cowper was but expressing the sentiments of Rousseau, omitting, of course, Rousseau's hearty dislike for England. But liberty suggests to Cowper a different and more solemn vein of thought. There are worse dungeons, he remembers, than the Bastille, and a slavery compared with which that of the victims of French tyranny is a trifle-- There is yet a liberty unsung By poets, and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the power Of earth and hell confederate take away. The patriot is lower than the martyr, though more highly prized by the world; and Cowper changes his strain of patriotic fervour into a prolonged devotional comment upon the text,