"Cowper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have long been accustomed to call "dumb," and the sign language of the lower orders of these dependent beings. The church owes it to her mission to preach and to teach the enforcement of the "bird's nest commandment;" the principle recognized by Moses in the Hebrew world, and echoed by Cowper in English poetry, and Burns in the "Meadow Mouse," and by our own Longfellow in ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... last mentioned writer, and his coadjutor Cowper, that we owe the first account of a man-like ape which has any pretensions to scientific accuracy and completeness. The treatise entitled, "'Orang-outang, sive Homo Sylvestris'; or the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a 'Monkey', an 'Ape', and ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... the peculiarities in Gypsey habits to which we have just now adverted, had not escaped the observation of that accurate delineator of men and manners, our celebrated poet, Cowper; as will ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the walling, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cherries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hemlocks and soft maples, for "a contemplative man's recreation." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and a whole host of similar 'sensation' stories, printed on coarse paper, with a flaming picture on the title-page. John Clare scarcely knew that there were any other books than these and the few he had seen at Glinton school in existence; he had never heard of Shakespeare and Milton, Thompson and Cowper, Spenser and Dryden; and, therefore, with the natural eagerness of the young mind just awoke to its day dreams, eagerly plunged into the new realm of fancy. The effect soon made itself felt upon the ardent reader, fresh from his undigested algebraic ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... surnames separately, the six commonest occupative names are Smith, Taylor, Clark, Wright, Walker, Turner. If we exclude Clark, as being more often a nickname for the man who could read and write, the sixth will be Cooper, sometimes spelt Cowper. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... however, I believe, no modern decided case to that effect. In the King's Bench, Trinity Term, 1790, the question occurred on occasion of an indictment, The King v. Topham, who, as a proprietor of a news-paper entitled The World, was found guilty of a libel against Earl Cowper, deceased, because certain injurious charges against his Lordship were published in that paper. An arrest of Judgment having been moved for, the case was afterwards solemnly argued. My friend Mr. Const, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Bryant. Byron. Burns. Campbell. Chaucer. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Coleridge. Cowper. Dante. Evangeline. Familiar Quotations. Favorite Poems. Goethe. Goldsmith. Hood. Hemans, Mrs. Homer's Odyssey. Homer's Iliad. Hiawatha. Holmes. Idylls of the King. In Memoriam. Kipling. Keble's Christian ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... crowned with success all her schemes in life, save one. Almira, her daughter, now verging upon her thirty-second year, had long been upon the anxious-seat as regarded matrimony; and with a sentimental turn that incited much reading of Cowper and Montgomery and (if it must be told) "Thaddeus of Warsaw," the poor girl united a sickly, in-door look, and a peaked countenance, which had not attracted wooers. The wonderful executive capacity of the mother had unfortunately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... in literature, not only by Defoe, but by Cowper in his "Lines on Solitude," beginning: "I am ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... syllable] I could never read without some strong emotions of delight or admiration.' 'If,' he continues, 'the poetry of Milton be examined with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it will appear that he has performed all that our language would admit.' Cowper was so indignant at Johnson's criticism of Milton's blank verse that he wrote:—'Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... was the Cowper of the wilderness; a solitary man loving the silent companionship of the woods. He leads us across the Alleghanies to the fields of Kentucky, before any white man's foot had traversed those magnificent realms. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... by an intercourse with civilized men, but they cannot be eradicated. The following is the poetical passage to which we alluded. Omai had, altogether, a more distinguished destiny than any other savage—he was cherished by Cook, painted by Reynolds, and apostrophised by Cowper:— ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... writes Cowper: not so however with the great Shaw, whose collection of worms is most disgusting; exceeded only by his reptiles preserved in spirits, with all their sickening exhibition of claws. He has got some dragons that fall little short of the Devil himself in general hideousness and outrageous ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... clothworker on London Bridge, whose only daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by leaping into the Thames after her, and eventually married. Among other peerages founded by trade are those of Fitzwilliam, Leigh, Petre, Cowper, Darnley, Hill, and Carrington. The founders of the houses of Foley and Normanby were remarkable men in many respects, and, as furnishing striking examples of energy of character, the story of their lives ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the things which a public speaker should attend to the most; because his audience certainly does, and understands them the best; or rather indeed understands little else. The late Lord Chancellor Cowper's strength as an orator lay by no means in his reasonings, for he often hazarded very weak ones. But such was the purity and elegance of his style, such the propriety and charms of his elocution, and such the gracefulness of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... farther down. A town charter for such a terminus was granted to a party of Virginia speculators at the mouth of Maria's River. They called it Ophir, which a friend of mine says is a very appropriate name and of poetic origin, being derived from Cowper's line, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... enriched with illustrations of the natural history of the district, and sent forth stirring appeals on subjects of social reformation and agricultural improvement. Devoted to his duties as a journalist, he continued to cherish his literary enthusiasm. In 1817 he published an edition of Cowper, with an elegant memoir of the poet's life. "The Scrap-Book," a work of selections and original contributions in prose and verse, appeared in 1820, and was speedily followed by a second volume. In 1823 he composed a memoir ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W. Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. But Mr Arnold's hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only exhibited a new form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to his tutor, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... them. Really, however, and with all his privileges, Lord Byron might as well not have written that strange letter about Pope. I could not afford it, poor as I am. Why does he pronounce, ex cathedra and robed, that Cowper is no poet? Cowper was a gentleman and of noble family like his critic. He was a teacher of morality as well as a describer of nature, which is more than his Lordship is. His John Gilpin will last as long as Beppo, and his verses to Mary are not less touching than the Farewell. If I ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... bread is deemed such dainty fare, That ev'ry prudent traveller His wallet loads with many a crust. COWPER. ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... taken quite young, and treated with kindness, are capable of being thoroughly tamed; the poet Cowper, describes the great difference in the dispositions of his three celebrated hares; so it is with other wild animals, and leopards among the rest, some returning kindness with the utmost affection, others being rugged and untameable from the first. Of those brought to this ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... young thrifty orchard, and at the base of the hill is a finely cultivated piece of land, and there is nothing but the everlasting hills to tell us of the dear spot where we wandered in the halcyon days of childhood; we cannot even exclaim with Cowper— ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... you how possible it is to enjoy much happiness in very mean employments. Cowper tells us that labour, though the primal curse, "has been softened into mercy;" and I think that, even had he not done so, I would have found out the fact for myself. It was twenty years last February since I set out a little before ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... drawing from beside my thigh My faulchion keen, with death-denouncing looks Rushed on her; she with a shrill scream of fear Ran under my raised arm, seized fast my knees, And in winged accents plaintive thus began: "Say, who art thou," etc.—Cowper's Odyss. x. 320. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... styles of composition. The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 'church-going' applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as objects ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Morley the wit and Lady Cowper the humorist, and Lady Ashburton, who tamed Carlyle; Lady Jersey, the queen of fashion, and the two sister-queens of beauty, Lady Canning and Lady Waterford; Lady Tankerville, who as a girl had taken refuge in ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... blackberry-picking, and the profits of blackberry-selling, none saying them nay; and many a pleasant and wholesome pudding or pie is to be found on tables in blackberry season, where such dainties are not often seen at any other time, unless, indeed, we except the whortleberry season. The poet Cowper ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... the Appendix. It is some what remarkable, that female poets have hitherto been the chief celebrators of Captain Cook in this country. Perhaps a subject which would furnish materials for as rich a production as Camoen's Lusiad, and which would adorn the pen of a Hayley or a Cowper, may hereafter call forth the genius of some ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... of this young man were ardent; his reading and information extensive; and his genius, though of a peculiar cast, considerable. His mind appeared, however, subject to something of that morbid sensibility which distinguished Cowper. The admiration excited in Mr. L. by Mr. Coleridge's pre-eminent talents, induced him to relinquish his connexion with the bank; and he had now arrived in Bristol to seek Mr. C. out, and to improve his ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... verrie cold betuix thame,) that without farder delay, conclusioun was taikin to invaid Sanctandrois, and the two young Lordis foirsaidis,[824] who than war thare verrie sklendarlie accumpanyed. Postis war send from the Quene with all diligence to Cowper, distant onelie sex myles from Sanctandrois, to prepair ludgeingis and victuallis for the Quene and hir Frenchemen. Ludgeingis war sygned, and furiouris[825] war send befoir. Whiche thing understand, counsale was gevin to the Lordis to marche fordward, and to prevent thame befoir thay ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Cowper's "Task."—In all early editions of Cowper's Task the opening lines of the 4th book are punctuated ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... place in the school, being "Prefect of Hall" when he left in 1788. Beyond these facts, Winchester seems to retain no impressions of her brilliant son, in this respect contrasting strangely with other Public Schools. Westminster knows all about Cowper—and a sorry tale it is. Canning left an ineffaceable mark on Eton. Harrow abounds in traditions, oral and written, of Sheridan and Byron, Peel and Palmerston. But Winchester is silent ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... has a very good house at the entrance in at the south, or head gate of the town, where he has had the honour several times to lodge and entertain the late King William of glorious memory in his returning from Holland by way of Harwich to London. Their recorder is Earl Cowper, who has been twice Lord High Chancellor of England. But his lordship not residing in those parts has put in for his deputy,—Price, Esq., barrister-at-law, and who dwells in the town. There are in Colchester eight churches besides those which are damaged, and five meeting-houses, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... forgotten the easy style of Walpole; we do not any longer care much for Johnson, though his letters are indeed models; we have no time for lovely whimsical elaborations like those of Cowper or Charles Lamb; but still some of us—persons of inferior mind perhaps—do attempt to write letters. To these I have a word to say. So far as I can judge, after passing many, many hundreds and thousands of letters through my hands, the best correspondents nowadays are either ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... as having written the “New Bath Guide,” and as having been deemed worthy a cenotaph in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and William Hayley, appear to have been among the best-known to fame at “the fanciful and romantic institution at Bath-Easton.” The latter was a friend of Cowper, Romney and Southey, and published the lives of the two former. In “English Bards and Scotch ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... means extinct amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this Johnson has written enough to reveal very genuine power. The touching verses upon the death of Levett are almost as pathetic as Cowper; and fragments of the two imitations of Juvenal have struck deep enough to be not quite forgotten. We still quote the lines about pointing a moral and adorning a tale, which conclude a really noble passage. We are too often ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Domestic, Clerical, and Literary; in which are included letters of Charles II, Cromwell, Fairfax, Edgecumbe, Macaulay, Wolcot, Opie, Whitaker, Gibbon, Buller, Courtenay, Moore, Downman, Drewe, Seward, Darwin, Cowper, Hayley, Hardinge, Sir Walter Scott, and other distinguished characters. By the Rev. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Cromwell's behalf, this poem was originally attr. to Milton, hence Cowper's inclusion of it. It has since been recognized ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... but with the want or forfeiture of every manly principle." And he did further accuse the said Bristow for that, in his proceedings in the regulation of the Nabob's household, "he should receive to himself, or Mr. Cowper for him, or a treasurer for both, (for the arrangement has never been well defined,) the money assigned for the support of the Nabob's household,—issue it as he pleased, not to the Nabob, but to the menial officers of his household,—dispose ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... life, so fruitful in failures; and it is the concentration of those rare manifestations of intellectual power, which no one can account for. It is made up, in the particular language here under consideration, of human beings as heterogeneous as Burns and Bunyan, De Foe and Johnson, Goldsmith and Cowper, Law and Fielding, Scott and Byron. The remark has been made that the history of an author is the history of his works; it is far more exact to say that, at least in the case of great writers, the history of their works is the history of their fortunes or ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client, By attempting to stretch him up into a giant; If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per- -sons fit for a parallel—Thomson and Cowper;[2] 850 I don't mean exactly,—there's something of each, There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach; Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness, And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Thomson, the discourses of Akenside and Armstrong, and the Night Thoughts of the arch-moralist Young. [Footnote: It may be noted that Young's blank verse has constantly the run of the heroic couplet.] In the case of Young—as later in that of Cowper—this is the more remarkable, because his Satires show him to have had complete command of the mechanism of the heroic couplet. That he should have deliberately chosen the rival metre is proof—a proof which even the exquisite work of Goldsmith is not sufficient to gainsay—that, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... The truth is, that it is with nations as with individuals. Neither in the one case nor in the other must we expect always to see them deposit their habitual feelings in their poetry. It is a well-known fact that Moliere was a man of a most serious disposition. Cowper, immediately before writing his "John Gilpin," was in a mood bordering on despair. Young, while composing his melancholy Night Thoughts, enjoyed his life as well as any man. The Russians do not sing their every-day sentiments, but their holiday feelings. That sweet pensiveness, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... members of the Legislature. There were no ladies present, and, as it was New Year's Eve, the audience generally felt a considerable freedom from restraint. Many of the members had partaken freely of the cup that cheers—assuredly not the cup indicated by Cowper—and were in the blissful condition of Tam O'Shanter upon a certain memorable occasion to which no more specific reference is necessary. In plain English, some of them were so drunk as to be unable to recall anything that occurred. All were full of mirth and jollity, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... speedily will be published, in one volume octavo, price three shillings, Poems,[61] by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. You may suppose, by the size of the publication, that the greatest part of them have never been long kept secret, because you yourself have never seen them; but the truth is, that they are most ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Negro Slavery than the amiable recluse whose writings can never die so long as lovers of poetry continue to live. Who has not at times turned away from the best-loved of the living poets, to regale himself with the compact, polished, sweetly ringing numbers of Cowper? On the subject of Slavery he had already given expression to his thoughts in language which at the present day, in certain portions of the United States, must subject his works to a strict expurgatorial process. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... whether it be proper to regard all such dispensations as judicial inflictions, we reply in the words of Cowper above: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... now examine two instances of the kind of teaching with which I am dealing and its results. The first is that of the poet Cowper, and anyone who takes the trouble to read his life as written by Southey will find the whole piteous tale fully drawn out. Southey hated the Catholic Church, of which, by the way, he knew absolutely nothing, but he had sufficient sense to reject the teachings ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... Cowper used to say that he never knew a poet who was not thriftless; and he included himself. Notwithstanding his quiet, retired life, he was constantly outrunning the constable. "By the help of good management," he once wrote, "and a clear notion of economical matters, I contrived in three ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... An instructive comparison of Milton, Cowper, and Wordsworth, which will further illustrate this subject, may be found in Macmillan's Magazine for ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Cowper's view of the charm of country life as compared with life in the town is a very natural one. The same view suggests itself to every cultivated denizen of the city who finds himself in the country on a beautiful June morning, or under a warm September sun, or during the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... on my list of friends, (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility), the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. COWPER. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... twilight. My favorite resting place is upon a mossy bank, near which flows a crystal brook whose dancing waters murmur with a melody almost as sweet as the low breathings of an Aeolian harp.—Here, with a volume of philosophic Cowper or fascinating Scott, I sometimes linger until twilight begins to deepen into darkness, and then return to meet with smiles the playful chidings of my husband, for my protracted absence—an offence he can easily forgive, if I present ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... turned away in the blinding storm to the Snowy Range, where he said he was going to camp out for a fortnight; a man of great abilities, real genius, singular gifts, and with all the chances in life which other men have had. How far more terrible than the "Actum est: periisti" of Cowper is his exclamation, "Lost! ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... furniture was improved; a score of ingenious little contrivances made the tiny attic into a cosy bed-chamber. One corner was full of shelves, laden with books, chiefly of a scientific and practical nature. John's taste did not lead him into the current literature of the day: Cowper, Akenside, and Peter Pindar were alike indifferent to him. I found among his ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney. Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again, and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising and falling of the ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden droop forward of her ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... generally with success. There are anecdotes hinging, however, on animals which have more to do with man than the other mammals referred to in the little story. These stories we have felt to be very interesting when they occur in biographies of great men. Cowper and his Hares, Huygens and his Sparrow, are tales—at least the former—full of interesting matter on the history of the lower animal, but are of most value as showing the influence on the man who amused himself by taming them. We ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... cried on great occasions, in great sorrow or great joy—not above half-a-dozen times in her life. Dulcie, whom the smallpox could not spoil, with her pretty forehead, cat's eyes, and fine chin. Does that description give you an idea of Dulcie—Dulcie Cowper, not yet Madam, but any day she liked Mistress Dulcie? It seems expressive. An under-sized, slight-made girl, with a little face clearly, very clearly cut, but round in all its lines as yet; an ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Cowper contributed much to the cause when he wrote the "Negro's Complaint," and thus excited the compassion of his numerous readers. Wedgewood aided the work, when he caused cameos to be struck, representing a kneeling African ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... elders know that though a strong, high- spirited popular boy like 'Win' might venture to excel big bullying dunces, such fair game as poor 'Slow' could be terrified into not only keeping below them, but into doing their work for them. To him Cowper's 'Tirocinium' had only ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Eduini and advised him, according to Bede, to adopt the religion of the monks from Rome, because it solved the fearful problem. In spite of years and change, this anxiety did not die out; it was felt by the Puritans, and Bunyan, and Dr. Johnson, and the poet Cowper. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... of the poet Cowper, which readers of Lavengro know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... O'Halloran. "An' I'm going to do this by mains of a thransleetion of Homer. For considher. Since Chapman no thransleetion has been made. Pope and Cowper are contimptible. Darby is onraydable. Gladstone's attimpt on the fust buk, an' Mat Arnold's on the seem, an' Worsley's Spinsayrians are all feclures. Ye see, they think only of maythers, an' don't considher doialicts. Homer wrote in the Oionic doialict, an' shud be thranslated into the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... all the more to be wondered at that a cat, which is such a master of this conversational sort of music, should ever attempt any other. There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone—was it Cowper?—-has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature, and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even for the donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... over my sister Anne's papers, I find mournful evidence that religious feeling had been to her but too much like what it was to Cowper; I mean, of course, in a far milder form. Without rendering her a prey to those horrors that defy concealment, it subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness; the pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes; she ever waited at the foot of a secret Sinai, listening in her ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... Cowper showed excellent sense when he wrote,—"Wherever else I am accounted dull, let me at least pass for a genius at Olney." The Hartford Wits passed for geniuses in Connecticut, which is better, as far as the genius is concerned, than any extent or duration of posthumous fame. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... been continued without end, if he could have continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused the seal. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... to say where this "smooth rock wet with constant springs" and the "copse-clad bank" were. There is no copse-clad bank fronting Anne Tyson's cottage at Hawkshead. It may have been a rock on the wooded slope of the rounded hill that rises west of Cowper Ground, north-west of Hawkshead. A rock "wet with springs" existed there, till it was quarried for road-metal a few years since. But it is quite possible that the cottage referred to is Dove Cottage, Grasmere. In that case the "rock" and "copse-clad bank" may have been on Loughrigg, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... not know any profession in London where a person makes his fortune so soon as in the law, if he be an eminent pleader. Several of them have of late years been advanced to the peerage; as Finch, Somers, Cowper, Harcourt, Trevor, Parker, Lechmere, King, Raymond, &c., scarce any of them much exceeding forty years of age when they arrived at ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... the Saco, river of the oak and elm, lies spread before the vision. The grand outlines of the gorge, the winding road through the whole extent, the leaping cascades flashing in the sunshine, all appear before the eye as in a picture. One feels like exclaiming with Cowper: ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... who had hitherto maintained a neutrality, thought proper openly to countenance that faction. By his interest, co-operating with the influence of the duchess of Marlborough, sir Nathan Wright was deprived of the great seal, which was committed to Mr. William Cowper, with the title of lord-keeper. This was a lawyer of good extraction, superior talents, engaging manners, and eminence in his profession. He was staunch to whig principles, and for many years had been considered as one of their best speakers in the house of commons. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... time an anti-slavery paper in Greenville, East Tennessee; which paper had an extensive circulation. About that time, I gathered up my anti-slavery juvenile doggerel, corrected it, as well as I could,—selected poems from Cowper and others, on the subject; forwarded the manuscript to the aforesaid B. Lundy, and the result was, a little volume of anti-slavery poems. But the abolition excitement broke out in the North, and the South took the alarm. The mouths of clergymen were closed in the pulpit; for it was deemed ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... Scott so exactly that, even in default of a special stimulus, there need be no surprise at the rapidity of his composition after he had fairly begun to move forward with it. Dryden, it may be remembered, was so held and fascinated by his 'Alexander's Feast' that he wrote it off in a night. Cowper had a similar experience with 'John Gilpin,' and Burns's powerful dramatic tale, 'Tam O'Shanter,' was produced with great ease and rapidity. De Quincey records that, in his own case, his very best work was frequently done when he was ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... charming Cowper, giving us to understand, by the drift of the context, that he intended the remark as having a moral as well as a physical application; since, as he there intimates, in "gain-devoted cities," whither naturally flow "the dregs and feculence of every land," and where "foul example in ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of May-month amusements" in the spring of 1871. It was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Adam Smith. Ethics: Paley, Smith, Tucker. Metaphysics: Reid. Theological and Religious Writers: Campbell, Paley, Watson, Newton, Hannah More, and Wilberforce. Poetry: Comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan; Minor Poets; Later Poems; Beattie's Minstrel; Cowper and Burns. 5. The Nineteenth Century. The Poets: Campbell, Southey, Scott, Byron; Coleridge and Wordsworth; Wilson, Shelley, Keats; Crabbe, Moore, and others; Tennyson, Browning, Procter, and others. Fiction: the Waverley and other Novels; Dickens, Thackeray, and others. History: Arnold, Thirlwall, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... have allowed Sir Richard in one or two instances to make a lunge at their church, I trust they will notice that I have permitted him the same licence with regard to the Church of England and Exeter Hall. Finally, my impartiality is proved by my allowing him to gird at the poet Cowper. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... ago discarded the clumsy implement. First it dropped its iron ring and became a clog; afterwards it was fined down into the pliant galoshe—lighter to wear and more effectual to protect—a no less manifest instance of gradual improvement than Cowper indicates when he traces through eighty lines of poetry his 'accomplished sofa' back to the original ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... a showy phrase, and "when I became ambitious of the title of Lavengro and strove to deserve it" was cut down to "when I became a student." When he wrote of Cowper in the third chapter he said, to justify Cowper's melancholy, that "Providence, whose ways are not our ways, interposed, and with the withering blasts of misery nipped that which otherwise might have terminated ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... "I think it was Cowper, but I'm not sure," answered Hester. "It can't be quite true though. I suspect man has more to do with the unmaking than the making of either. We have reason to be glad he has not come near enough to us yet to destroy either our river ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... miserable for nearly a year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for crime) who did all he could to pollute the infant mind of the little fag delivered over to his cruelty. Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... ye brought us To the man-degrading mart,— All sustain'd by patience, taught us Only by a broken heart,— Deem our nation brutes no longer, Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard, and stronger Than the colour of our kind." COWPER. ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... added to the already large bibliography of a fascinating subject in The Romance of the Lace Pillow (H.H. ARMSTRONG), published at Olney from the pen of Mr. THOMAS WRIGHT. Olney, of course, has two claims on our regard—COWPER and Lace, and it is now evident that Mr. WRIGHT has kept as attentive an eye on the one as on the other. His book makes no pretence to be more than a brief and frankly popular survey of the art of lace-making chiefly in Northamptonshire ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... both, it had been my intention to pursue the subject still further in detail, and to endeavour to trace throughout the various excellences and defects, both of his poetry and his life, the operation of these two dominant attributes of his nature. "No men," says Cowper, in speaking of persons of a versatile turn of mind, "are better qualified for companions in such a world as this than men of such temperament. Every scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one; and the mind that has an equal mixture ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals, and the compound ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,—there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... contended, no royal prerogative could be enabled or permitted to override. That question was not, however, brought before Parliament, to which, at that time, the King could, probably, not have trusted for any leanings in his favor; but he referred it, in an informal way, to the Lord Chancellor (Lord Cowper) and the Common-law Judges. They investigated it with great minuteness. A number of precedents were adduced for the marriage and education of the members of the royal family being regulated by the sovereign, beginning with Henry III., who gave his daughter Joan, without her own consent, in marriage ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... era, the most amiable of English poets felt constrained to weave into his exquisite Elegy an undulating thread of modest apology for bringing under notice the short and simple annals of the Vaisya caste. Later, Cowper thought poverty, humility, industry, and piety a beautiful combination for the wearer of the smock frock. Even Crabbe blindly accepted the sanctified lie of social inequality. And this assumption was ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... qualities of external things; but the sublime conception of the ancients, that these forms and qualities had an abstract preexistence in the divine mind, is a common doctrine of many English authors, as Milton, Cowper, Akenside, and others. For example: "Now if Ens primum be the cause of entia a primo, then he hath the idea of them in him: for he made them by counsel, and not by necessity; for then he should have needed them, and they have a parhelion of that wisdom ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in her Letters; her excellent Letters, so far as I can see and judge, next best to Walpole and Cowper in our ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Enclosure Acts at the beginning of the century was nothing like the number at the end, the process was steadily going on, often by non-parliamentary enclosure, and was approved by nearly every one. Some, however, were opposed to it. John Cowper, who wrote an essay on 'Enclosing Commons' in 1732, said, a common was often the chief support of forty or fifty poor families, and even though their rights were bought out they were under the necessity ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... this made the position of the Royal George much more upright in the water than it would otherwise have been. There she lay at the bottom of the sea, just as you have seen small vessels when left by the tide on a bank. Cowper, when he heard the sad tale, ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... indifference or of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his worth.[Footnote: See To Darwin.] But the average poet of the last century and a half goes a step beyond this attitude, and appears to feel that there is something ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... procured he expired. There is something extremely touching in the details of this event, as given by the poet, her grandson. They strongly show how real an evil poverty is, in even the most favourable circumstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper ceased to envy the "'peasant's nest" when he thought how its solitude made scant the means of life.' We would almost covet the hut of Annie M'Donald as described by her grandson. 'It appeared,' he says, 'as if separated ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... COWPER, THE POET, is proposed to be erected in Westminster Abbey, from a design by Marshall, the Sculptor, exhibited at the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... Their noble birth; conduct us to the tombs Of their forefathers, and from age to age Ascending, trumpet to their illustrious race." COWPER. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'—our most famous she-ditto—belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... ellipses and transpositions and imagery abound in poetry, and how, in the use of these particulars, poets differ from each other. He may note that poems are not pitched in the same key—that the extracts from Wordsworth and Goldsmith and Cowper, for example, deal with common facts and in a homely way, that the one from Lowell is in a higher key, while that from Shelley is all imagination, and is crowded with audacious imagery, all exquisite except in the first line, where the moon, converted by metaphor into a maiden, has that ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... but the security it furnishes against the dissipation of the elements of the social circle outweighs thousands of such trifles, and we half suspect that this objection was originated, and is mischievously propagated, by those who are already developing a love for other beverages. If Cowper, with the "sofa" assigned as his subject, could sing so beautifully of all things social and domestic, what might he not have done with the tea-table—the rallying-point of social life to so many who never ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... usually find in her husband less refinement of manners than she herself possesses; and it is her great privilege, if not her solemn duty, to illustrate the line of Cowper, and show that she ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... naturally develop themselves into a high idyllic faculty; for it is the very essence of the idyl to set forth the poetry which lies in the simpler manifestations of Man and Nature; yet not explicitly, by a reflective moralising on them, as almost all our idyllists—Cowper, Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth—have been in the habit of doing, but implicitly, by investing them all with a rich and delightful tone of colouring, perfect grace of manner, perfect melody of rhythm, which, like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, shall glorify without altering the most trivial ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... for the sake of the pleasure of meeting them always in the final fulness of local colour afforded them by his utterance. While he read, they busied their fingers with their embroidery; for as yet that graceful work, so lovelily described by Cowper in his Task, had not begun to vanish before the crude colours and mechanical vulgarity of Berlin wool, now happily in its turn vanishing like a dry dust cloud into the limbo of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... of the eunuchs and of Velutti, mentioned by Mondat, and consisted of an azooespermic discharge, made up mainly from the secretion of the seminal vesicles, the accessory glands of the urethra, the prostate, and Cowper's glands, as well as the discharge from the secretory glands distributed along the course of the urethral mucous membrane. Some of the cases of this form of impotence have exhibited wonderful copulating desire and ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... nearly annihilated. I mention him here from his relation to the advancement of learning in my juvenile days. His opinion on the various editions was deemed conclusive; and he controlled the judgment as well as the pocket of the purchaser. He was long in epistolary correspondence with "the friend of Cowper," as some call him—old John Newton of London; and I have often wondered that no enterprise has yet brought forward, in a new edition of the writings of Newton, their correspondence. It is not for me to dwell on the contrast, so striking, between the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... If any one would read a description of this process, enlivened and enforced by the powers of the most exquisite poetry, let him peruse the middle and latter part of the fifth Book of COWPER'S Task. My warm attachment to the exquisitely natural compositions of this truly Christian poet may perhaps bias my judgment; but the part of the work to which I refer appears to me scarcely surpassed by any thing in our language. The honourable epithet of Christian may justly be ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... by the coach a new number of an interesting periodical publication, and walked forward on the highway to meet it, with the impatience which Cowper has described as actuating the resident in the country when longing for intelligence from the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... It was Uncle Toby and the troublesome fly over again, as immortalized by the genius of Sterne: "Get thee gone, poor devil! there is room enough in the world for thee and for me," quoth Uncle Toby. And does not Cowper say— ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... happy as we once to kneel and draw The chalky ring and knuckle down at taw. This fond detachment to the well known place, When first we started into life's long race, Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway, We feel it e'en in age and at our latest day. COWPER. ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... thinking that now he would be of service to him, claimed him as his property. This led to the matter being taken up; a suit was instituted; and by a decision of the Court of King's Bench, slavery could no longer exist in England. That became law in 1772. The poet Cowper has some beautiful lines on ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... would be in a picture a hundred times copied, the copyists never reverting to the original. You cannot look into this eighteenth century poetry, excepting, of course, a great proportion of the poetry of Cowper and Thompson, without being struck with the sort of agreement that nothing should be said naturally. A certain set form and mode was employed for saying things that ought never to have been said twice in the same way. Wordsworth ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... prejudice and petulancy are apt to get the better of a man's judgment, Landor was most generous in his estimate of many young writers. I remember to have once remarked, that on one page he had praised (and not passingly) Cowper, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Burns, Campbell, Hemans, and Scott. In the conversation between Archdeacon Hare and Landor, the latter says: "I believe there are few, if any, who enjoy more heartily than I do the best poetry of my contemporaries, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... height where I stood; and 200 feet below, the beautiful cemetery, where its dead await the morning of the resurrection. Yet, while contrasting the trees and atmosphere here with the comparatively stunted, puny foliage of England, and the chilly skies of a northern clime, I thought with Cowper respecting my own ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... I took tea and spent a pleasant hour with the principal of a select school, kept in a large, dignified and comfortable mansion, once occupied by the poet Cowper. In the yard behind the house there is a wide-spreading and prolific pear-tree planted by his hands. This, too, was one of the thousands of old, stately dwellings you meet with here and there, which have no beginning nor end that you can get at. Cowper lived and wrote in this, for instance; but ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... lief encounter a West India hurricane or a simoom. I used to feel him coming an hour beforehand. Then I would read a little in Blair, take a peep at Sir Charles Grandison, swallow half a page of Cowper's 'Task,' and look over the Grecian and Roman heroes; then I was fortified. 'Why didn't I take Shelley?' Oh my! why, he couldn't endure Shelley, said he was a poor, weak creature, all gone to imagination! Then I would assume a Sontag and thick boots, if the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of Irving's early books fall within the last ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... as possible, the wrongs which suffering or neglect had inflicted on him. The Lounger had at that time a wide circulation in Scotland, and penetrated even to England. It was known and read by the poet Cowper, who, whether from this or some other source, became acquainted with the poems of Burns within the first year of their publication. In July, 1787, we find the poet of The Task telling a correspondent that he had read Burns's poems twice; "and though they be written in a ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... In 1818 Edward Cowper, a printer of Nelson Square, patented certain improvements in printing, these improvements consisting of a better distribution of the ink and a better plan for conveying the sheets from the cylinders. Having ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... what the 'Cry of the Children' meant, or anything about Cowper's grave, would I? And if I punctuated it myself, I might not get all she meant. I might make a meaning of my own, and ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... which are preserved, give abundant evidence of his activity and usefulness in that office. Sir Isaac Newton proved himself an efficient Master of the Mint, the new coinage of 1694 having been carried on under his immediate personal superintendence. Cowper prided himself upon his business punctuality, though he confessed that he "never knew a poet, except himself, that was punctual in anything." But against this we may set the lives of Wordsworth and Scott—the former a distributor ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... at school on the defense of the rights of dumb animals, and there was one piece in the school Reader in which he must have found a sympathetic chord, and which was probably one of those that he loved to recite. It was written by the sad poet Cowper, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... their love of nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with Pope's retreat at Twickenham. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time, I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard essayists and philosophers of English literature—Addison, Steele, Cowley, Johnson, Locke—and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays again, they were ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... diary of William Cowper, afterwards Lord Mount-Temple, we also reproduce from the same author: "On Saturday, October 27, 1827, the subject ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... 1871. Dedication: "To the Countess Cowper.—If I mention the simple truth: that this poem absolutely owes its existence to you,—who not only suggested, but imposed on me as a task, what has proved the most delightful of May-month amusements—I shall seem honest, indeed, but hardly prudent; for, how good and beautiful ought such ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal that song, "Once you come to Forty Year," or the lines on the Venice Love-lamp, or the "Cane-bottomed Chair"? Of living English writers of verse in the "familiar style," as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender and not untouched with melancholy, as in "The Portrait of a Lady," and Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the "Song of Four Seasons" and "The Dead Letter." He has ingenuity, pathos, ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... resolution, and no less than four of them seriatim rejected the doctrine contended for by Lord Wintoun's counsel. They were all eminent members of Parliament, and three of them great and eminent lawyers, namely, the then Attorney-General, Sir William Thomson, and Mr. Cowper. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was weaving his wonderful songs among the Lowland hills of Scotland, another lover of nature was telling of placid English life, of simple everyday doings, in a quiet little country town in England. This man was William Cowper. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... God's lower works, but entering into the depths of divine contemplation, into the very adyta of the heavenly temple. And it is no less interesting to recollect that in spite of Dr. Johnson's sage diction, sacred poetry of a very high order has, since his day, abounded. Cowper has extracted it from "the intercourse between God and the human soul;" Montgomery has made now "the supplication," and now the "thanksgiving," of the poor negro ring in every ear, and vibrate through every heart; Coleridge has expressed, in his sounding and splendid measures, at one time his "faith," ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... their ancestors, and the degeneracy of their contemporaries. This is in general merely a cant. But in 1756 it was something more. At this time appeared Brown's Estimate, a book now remembered only by the allusions in Cowper's Table Talk and in Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. It was universally read, admired, and believed. The author fully convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... first when the fear of Spanish invasion was rife in 1585. They did yeoman service against their own king in the Civil War, but later fell into despite and were mocked by poets no more warlike than themselves. Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle" was of their company, and Cowper's "John Gilpin" was "a train-band captain." Now, however, they are so far restored to their earlier standing that when they are called out to celebrate, say, the Fourth of July, or on any of the high military ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... recurrence to his mother, a regret which never left him through life was buried. Like Cowper, he mourned, as the profoundest of all sorrows, the loss of that ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... were genuine Poets. They uttered, in fine style, many truths; and were not merely fluent in their respective languages, but affluent. But, perhaps, like some other men of mighty parts and grand proportions, better for mankind they had never been born. A Cowper and a Byron, in their whole career of song, will exert a very different influence, not only on earth, but in eternity, on the destiny of their amateurs. We need not argue this position as though, among a Christian people, it were a doubtful or debatable position. If the evil spirit, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bull.] [GREEK HERE] Homer Il. xvii 522 As when some vig'rous youth with sharpen'd axe A pastur'd bullock smites behind the horns And hews the muscle through; he, at the stroke Springs forth and falls. Cowper's Translation. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... called them Puritans at the close of the sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from the "Parson," the jovial ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... DEAN COWPER, of Durham, who was very economical of his wine, descanting one day on the extraordinary performance of a man who was blind, remarked, that the poor fellow could see no more than "that bottle."—"I do not wonder at it at all, sir," ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... those of a poet are worthy to behold the celebrated valley of Llangollen, where we next proceeded, after having drawn largely on the firm of Messrs. Wordsworth, Cowper, Thomson, and Co. for language to pay a due tribute of admiration to this surpassing scene,—but who has a genius equal to the majesty of nature? I thought of the Mahometan who turned back when he observed some ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin |
