A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35 



Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with 

 the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh 

 with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened 

 across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing 

 that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than 

 the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But 

 Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those 

 robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing 

 influence of the darkened year. In December, 1 780, he 

 writes : " At this season of the year, and in this gloomy 

 Uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner 

 of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to 

 fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement." 

 Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton ? 

 Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual 

 feeling, for it is only there that poets disenthral them- 

 selves of their reserve and become fully possessed of their 

 greatest charm, the power of being franker than other 

 men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms 

 his preference of the country to the city even in winter : 



" But are not wholesome airs, though unperfuraed 

 By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, 

 And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure 

 From clamor, and whose very silence charms, 

 To be preferred to smoke ? . . . . 

 They would be, were not madness in the head 

 And folly in the heart ; were England now 

 What England was, plain, hospitable kind, 

 And undebauched." 



The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking 

 mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous com- 

 panionship of nature. This appears even more clearly in 

 the Fourth Book : 



" Winter, ruler of the inverted year " ; 



but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant 

 it always is to track poets through the gardens of their 



