in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door, “Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps _In unsuspecting pomp_;” in the patient cattle, that on the winter’s morning “Mourn in corners where the fence Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep _In unrecumbent sadness_;” in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk, “At once, swift as a bird, Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush, And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm And anger insignificantly fierce.” And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling: “The heart is hard in nature, and unfit For human fellowship, as being void Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike To love and friendship both, that is not pleased With sight of animals enjoying life, Nor feels their happiness augment his own.” His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human life—the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager’s wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth, while her infants “sit cowering o’er the sparks,” “Retires, content to quake, so they be warm’d;” or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick “A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook;” and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold sympathies, not by exhortations, not by telling us to meditate at midnight, to “indulge” the thought of death, or to ask ourselves how we shall “weather an eternal night,” _but by presenting to us the object of his compassion truthfully and lovingly_. And when he handles greater themes, when he takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations, there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or his satire, but puts his finger on some particular vice or folly which excites his indignation or “dissolves his heart in pity,” because of some specific injury it does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is asked why he interests himself about the sorrows and wrongs of others, hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of the planets show a mutual dependence, and that “Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this Material picture of benevolence,” or that— “More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts, And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.” What is Cowper’s answer, when he imagines some “sage, erudite, profound,” asking him “What’s the world to you?”