Then, alluding to the view, entertained by many, then as now, that what we call Nature’s operations are upheld and carried forward by fixed laws, which spare the Maker all further trouble, he asserts that all things are impelled “To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force, And under pressure of some conscious cause. The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect Whose cause is God.” Nor does he step at this merely theistic view. He goes on to the distinctly Christian teaching of St. John and St. Paul, so easy to assert, so hard to take home to the feelings and imagination, that it is the Eternal and Incarnate Word who is the Creator and Sustainer of this visible universe. “All are under One. One Spirit—his Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows— Rules universal Nature. Not a flower But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, Of his unrivaled pencil.” No doubt Cowper held and believed this firmly, and it may be at times had keen intuition of its truth. But it cannot be said that he attained to make it felt in his ordinary descriptions of the every-day landscape. He does not describe Nature as if he habitually saw it as a living being plastic to an overruling and informing spirit. Rather he beheld her more as common eyes behold her, as a mechanism, with fixed features and a definite outline, which do not spontaneously, and without an exertion of thought, lend themselves as vehicles of spiritual reality. If he had been more possessed with the mystical vision he might have been a higher poet for the few. He would not have been what he has been called, the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear, the familiar companion of every quiet English household. But though Cowper’s “Task” is full of scenery, it is not purely, or even mainly, descriptive poetry. More than its rural character is its deep, tender, universal human-heartedness. Man and his interests are paramount, as paramount as in Pope or any other city poet. Only it is not the conventional, not the surface part of man, but that which is permanent in him and universal. In his indignation against injustice and oppression, his hatred of slavery, his large sense of universal brotherhood, and his revolt against all that hinders it, we already hear in his poetry the not far-off murmur of the Revolution, and of the new era it was bringing in. His denunciation of the Bastile but four years before it fell— “Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair, There’s not an English heart that would not leap To hear that ye were fallen at last,”—