Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/234

224 faithful to what he has, and never neglecting an opportunity to use it." A poet who identifies "evangelical light" with "the vision and the faculty divine" may write The Castaway, but one is not likely to find in his works those intimate revelations of truth that flash in convincing beauty from the lines of the true spiritualists, such as Wordsworth, Shelley, or Emerson. Cowper's misfortune, both as a man and a poet, was this substitution of dogma for instinct, which, operating in so sensitive and feeble a nature, made religion, which was his vital interest, not a life but a disease, and gave to the activities of his higher powers the character of mania. It is misleading, therefore, to think of these letters as the fruit of a deeply religious mind; they are the record of the efforts of a creed-believing mind to get rid of itself, and their virtues—their amiability, their delight in small adventures, their interest in literature and humanity—exist not in consequence of but in spite of the religious bent of their author.

Cowper was deficient, too, æsthetically as well as spiritually, and the character of his limitations was much the same in both respects. His sense of beauty was practically