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# The Poetical Works of William Cowper (Benham)

edited by William Benham. HathiTrust full text for the 1870 edition and 1874 edition.
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
WILLIAM COWPER
The Globe Edition
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
WILLIAM COWPER
WITH NOTES AND BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
BY
WILLIAM BENHAM
VICAR OF ADDINGTON
AND PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON
London, and New York:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1870
[All Rights reserved.]
TO THE
MOST REVEREND R. C. TRENCH, D.D.
LORD ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN.
My dear Lord Archbishop,
When I asked leave to dedicate to you this Edition of Cowper's Poems, I wished to express, in the only way that lies in my power, my gratitude for past kindnesses, and for all that I have learned from you. But, independently of these feelings, I know that all readers of this volume will recognize a fitness in the offering for your acceptance the Works of one whose writings were so natural and pure and good, and whose command of his mother-tongue was so complete. With deep feelings of affection and sympathy,
I remain,
My dear Lord Archbishop,
Your Grace's faithful Servant,
W. BENHAM
Addington Vicarage, July 9, 1870.
CONTENTS
* Early Poems
* Olney Hymns
* First Published Volume of Poems
* Poems
* Posthumous Poems of Middle and Later Life
* Translations from the French Madame De La Motte Guyon
* Translations from Milton
* Translations from Vincent Bourne
* Translations from the Latin Classics
* Epigrams, Translated the Latin of Own
* Translations from Greek Verses
* Translations of English Verses
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
# The Poetical Works of William Cowper (Benham)/Charity

CHARITY.
# The Poetical Works of William Collins/To Evening

ODE TO EVENING.
* ↑ Ver. 2. May hope, O pensive Eve, to soothe thine ear.
* ↑ Ver. 3. Like thy own solemn springs,
* ↑ Ver. 9. While air is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat:
* ↑ Ver. 24. Who slept in flowers the day,
* ↑ Ver. 29. Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile,
* ↑ Ver. 31.Or upland fallows grey, Reflect its last cool gleam.
* ↑ Ver. 33. But when chill blustering winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,
* ↑ Ver. 49. So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship,Science, rose-lipp'd Health, Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy favourite name!
Variations.
# The Poetical Works of William Collins/To Fear

ODE TO FEAR.
* ↑ Alluding to the Κύνας ἄφυκτους of Sophocles. See the Electra.
* ↑ Æschylus.
* ↑ Jocasta.
* ↑ ———οὐδ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ὠρώρει βοή, Ἠν μὲν σιωπή· φθέγμα δ᾽ ἐξαίφνης τινὸς θώϋξεν αὐτόν, ὥστε πάντας ὀρθίας Στῆσαι φόβω δείσαντας ἐξαίφνης τρίχας. See the OEdip. Colon. of Sophocles.
# The Poetical Works of William Cowper (Benham)/Index to First Lines

​Page:The poetical works of William Cowper (IA poeticalworksof00cowp).pdf/21 ​Page:The poetical works of William Cowper (IA poeticalworksof00cowp).pdf/22 ​Page:The poetical works of William Cowper (IA poeticalworksof00cowp).pdf/23 ​Page:The poetical works of William Cowper (IA poeticalworksof00cowp).pdf/24
# The Poetical Works of William Collins/To Pity

ODES.
ODE TO PITY.
* ↑ Euripides, of whom Aristotle pronounces, on a comparison of him with Sophocles, that he was the greater master of the tender passions, ἦν τραγικώτερος.
* ↑ The river Arun runs by the village of Trotton in Sussex where Otway had his birth.
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Good of the College

I HAVE always been interested in the fact that the undergraduate who goes into any outside activity usually explains his action, even when it involves derelictions or irregularities, on the ground that he was induced to do so on account of his love for his Alma Mater and the good he could do the College.
I have spent hours this spring with a mentally lethargic junior who wishes to get off probation in order that he may compete in athletics, his sole purpose, so he alleges, being that he may bring honor and distinction to the college. Having loafed away his hours of intellectual grace, he feels that he could more than redeem himself if he were allowed to hurl the discus or do the one hundred yard dash. He feels that the insti​tution is honored more by his physical achievements than by his mental. Ten seconds flat is more to be desired than a grade of 83 in Poly Science 4.
We are to have at the University within a few days hundreds of high school boys, most of whom are nearly ready to enter college. Whenever I have asked the purpose of bringing these young fellows here in the midst of term time, I have invariably got the reply that it was all for the college good. We are to show these visitors what college life is like; we are to attract them by giving them a fair idea of what we have to offer and what they will have to pay for it in time and thought and money if they come.
I wonder if we do it?
If the boy goes home convinced that college life is a mixture of May-pole dance and circus, of vaudeville and fox trot, of base ball and band, the college may not have profited as much as we might desire. For most students the college life is a serious ​life filled with difficult problems and hard work and duties and obligations which require the most of a man's time.
It is good to have the high school student here, I am sure, but if he goes home without carrying with him some impression of the serious life and the serious work of the successful student, he will have gained a wrong impression of college, and his coming will in no way contribute to the good of the college.
The responsibility is upon those who entertain him to show him a good time and yet to give him a fair idea of what a successful intellectual life in college really requires.
May
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Greatest Thing

SOMETIMES we feel in these commercial days when everyone seems to be engaged in piling up money for the furtherance of his own selfish personal ends that the age of sentiment and chivalry is gone, that there are no gentle gallant knights, no faithful unselfish lovers; but it is not so. It is only because our sight is dimmed or our senses dulled that we do not see the romance or feel the sentiment or catch the music that is about us.
Out on the back campus last Tuesday morning a little scene was enacted—the singing of a few songs, the making of a few brief speeches, the digging of a spade full of earth to celebrate the beginning of a new University building. To the thoughtless on looker it might have seemed a very mechanical procedure, but in reality it was as touching and ​tender a tribute as was ever paid by a man to the woman he loved. It was a beautiful climax to a beautiful companionship which had lasted through many years.
In the early days of the war of the Rebellion an officer of the northern army was stationed in a southern city. He met there a young southern girl to whom he became devoted. They were married at the close of the war, and she came north with him to make for them a home. They lived together happily for many years. Through struggle, and toil, and poverty, and sorrow to success their devotion to each other was beautiful to see. Through all the years which they spent together there was no diminution of his faithfulness, of his courtesy, of his adoration, or of hers. She was to him always the young beautiful girl whom he had won in the south; he was to her a faithful and gallant knight. Even when she died he remained her tender lover.
The little ceremony on Tuesday was the ​breaking of ground for the building which is to be erected in her memory and into which is to go the bulk of the modest fortune which they together accumulated. It is a noble gift, the thought of which is inspiring. It robs one of cynicism; it strengthens one's faith in the realities of life and of love.
"What a fool a man is," someone says, "to give the savings of a life time to an institution supported by the state." But in reality those who sacrifice and give to a cause or to an individual whom they love are the only wise men. By his sacrifice and his generosity this man has dignified love and made it real; he has strengthened our faith in the goodness of humanity; he has enriched his own life, and he has added a touch of sentiment and idealism to an institution where such things are all too rare.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Paper From Home

I WAS waiting my turn at Gaston's while the freshman polished off an Ag instructor, when Kohl, who, though he is a junior, is still an enthusiastic supporter of his home town, came in to borrow the Centralia Daily Sentinel to read the personal column.
Curiosity got the better of my early training in manners, and I glanced at the paper. He was reading:
"James Heffington is playing the cornet for Linn Byers.
Postmaster Bill Whitney has had a new sign painted for the postoffice.
Miss Jessie Siegler will entertain the embroidery club at her home this afternoon.
McKinley Miller visited over Sunday with friends in Odin.
The Baptist Sunday School will give an ice cream supper Saturday evening at the ​home of Frank Chumbley. Come and bring your friends."
"That Heffington kid is some cornet player," Kohl commented when he saw I was looking. "He'll be a soloist in the University band one of these days. I've been wondering, too, for a long time whether or not Mac Miller was still thinking about that girl over at Odin. I knew her when we were in grammar school. It's some town I live in."
The life in college is likely to wean us too quickly from the old home folks and the old home life. We may come foolishly in time to feel that there is no training worth while but that which we get in college, that there is no education but that which we get out of books. We who are in college are living and feeding too much upon theories, so that it is good for us occasionally to get a taste of the simple, commonplace things of practical life. There is nothing that will give us this better than the home paper.
​While we have been learning calculus and economics; the theories of versification and genetics; conversational French and Ibsen, it is helpful to be reminded that the home-folks have not been altogether standing still—that Frank Chumbley is developing social finesse and religious fervor in circulating the ice cream, that Jessie Siegler is cultivating a love for the beautiful through the embroidery club, and that McKinley Miller is taking an elementary course in home economics by correspondence and by an occasional private lesson from the girl at Odin.
There is no agency like the home paper for developing a broad human interest and for keeping us in touch with the friendships and the ideals of our youth.
February
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Test

THE operation had been a serious one in which life and death had hung in the balance. It was over now, and the boy who had lain white and still stirred uneasily, struggling to come back from the far away country of unconsciousness in which he had been wandering. He opened his eyes once or twice and looked about vaguely. Presently he recognized the face of the physician bending over him and spoke.
"Is it all over, doctor?" Was it worth while?"
"It is all over, Tom," the older man replied gently, "and it was very much worth while. You stood the test, and you are going to be well and strong soon."
It's a question we ask often, when we have been through a struggle or a mental or a moral or a physical trial, and it is a ​question I have no doubt many of you are asking as you come to the end of the college year or the college course. It has cost father in many cases more cold cash than he could well afford, and it has cost mother some heart aches and no little sacrifice I guarantee, and it has cost or is costing you some struggle of one sort or another and some of the best years of your life.
Has it been worth while? That depends.
"I traveled a straight road when I was a freshman" I heard a '17 man say a few days ago, "but I've learned a few things this year, believe me." But as I listened unwillingly to the vulgar detail I knew that the money was wasted, and the time lost, and the years not worth while.
What is the test? It isn't always high grades; I've known a lot of decent fellows who flunked Math. 9 or who couldn't get by Chem. 13a, and one of the worst bums I ever knew made an honorary society. It isn't always college activities, for sometimes ​when he gets a place honorably he goes to sleep at the switch. It isn't popularity, for often "good fellow" is only another name for vulgar sport.
This year or two years or four years of college,—what has it done for you; how has it changed you? Has it brought you friends, an increasing love for things that are clean and wholesome and beautiful, a broader and a kindlier outlook, mental discipline, ideals, character? When you go to the work of your life next week or get off the accommodation train at the little country town where you were born, is it with greater courage, and cleaner morals, and higher ideals, and increased possibilities of success? If so, you've passed the test, and college for you has been gloriously worth while.
June
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Liar

I HAVE had to do with almost every variety of undergraduate during the last twenty years—the coarse, the illiterate, the sullen, the impertinent, the vicious, and the dissipated—I can do business with any but the liar. I do not know on what ground to meet him.
I was talking to Brown with regard to his study list. "Have you turned in your change slip as you were asked to do last week?" I inquired.
"Yes," was his quick reply. "I gave it to the Dean on the day I saw you."
"I will just speak to him about it," I continued, reaching for the telephone receiver, "and be sure that everything is all right." Brown dropped his head for a moment, but as I called the number, he spoke.
​"You needn't ask," he said, "I lied to you; I have the paper in my pocket yet."
It was simply to save himself from censure that he had told the untruth. He had been careless and procrastinating; he intended to do the thing immediately on leaving my office; it never occurred to him, as it seldom occurs to the ordinary young liar, that any one would check up on him. I could with difficulty bring myself to believe him again.
"If you will reinstate me," a boy said to me last semester, "I shall not cut any more this year. Don't you believe me?" he continued, when he saw that I smiled.
"I should, perhaps," I answered, "if you had ever kept your word with me before."
A young fellow can lie, get away with it and brag about it for a few times, but ultimately people find him out. The unfulfilled promise, the broken engagement, the duty that was assumed and then never fulfilled all react on the individual. These things seem trifling at first, but such a man comes ​in time to realize that his reputation is gone, nobody trusts him, nobody believes him; and a man whom nobody trusts is a failure.
Truth is a virtue; it is more than that; it is a cash account in the bank against which one may always draw. The liar's statements come in time to be discounted even when he is telling the truth.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Reunion

THE senior craned his neck and looked curiously and interestedly at the old grads returned to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. They seemed a rather battered lot to the young fellow just preparing for the struggles of life. The men were heavy or bald or gray, and the lines cut deeply into their faces. Some of the women were still pretty, but—but they were not young. It was depressing to him to feel that as success came youth seemed to vanish.
I remember in my freshman year asking an indifferent senior what he was expecting to do after graduation. "Something easy and profitable," was his reply. "The work can't be too light nor the salary too big for me." He is not now earning a thousand dollars a year. He has never realized that success means struggle and sacrifice and re​sponsibility; that it means doing the hardest things one can find, and sometimes doing them for little compensation. And struggle and sacrifice leave their marks. The wrinkles and the gray hair and the rounding shoulders are usually but the signs of developed character and accomplishment. They are the honorable scars of intellectual and moral battle. Few who succeed escape them.
A friend of mine who was staying at a high-priced summer place last year remarked to his wife how few young people there were at the hotel. "That isn't strange," she replied. "One has to be middle aged to have made enough money to come here."
The reunion was a happy one; men and women came thousands of miles to enjoy the pleasures and to live over again the joys of youth and irresponsibility. Most of them had accomplished a good deal, but the marks were there,—clearly, undeniably, and ​they will always be. If our characters have developed, if we have struggled and sacrificed and fought, our faces will tell the tale.
The story is told of a well-known public character that when he held in his hand a photograph of himself with all the lines smoothed out and all the wrinkles obliterated, he objected. "It cost me fifty years of hard struggle and endeavor to put those lines in," he said, "and I don't want them taken out."
Perhaps those who took part in the reunion did not look young to the senior, but they showed character; they had been through a fight and had won the battle.
June
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Snap

"I'M looking for a three-hour course to fill up my program for next semester," Gregg said to me yesterday, "Do you know of any snap course?"
Before I answered him, my mind went back to commencement time. We were sitting on the porch talking it over, Frank and I, after the fellows had left. We had been celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation from college, and we had had three happy days together with the fellows, some of whom we had not seen since the day we parted after our commencement exercises. We had all been struck by the changes which had come to each of us, and naturally each one had swelled with satisfaction whenever some one intimated that he had changed little.
Mac had been in Arizona most of the time ​working cruelly hard in the mines; he was bald and seamed, and crippled with rheumatism. Pete's hair, which had been a riotous bunch of black curls, was entirely white. Fred, who had been slender and smooth cheeked showed a face that bore the mark of hard struggle and a physique that pulled the scales at twice the amount he could manage when he was a freshman. Ed seemed most like himself; brown haired, smooth faced, slender as a boy, he had changed least of all. Life had been a rather easy routine for him; he had not needed money; he had struggled little; he had developed little ambition; he entered only slightly into the reminiscences and the controversies which sprang up; he had no plans for the future, little thought of the past.
After they were all gone some way we decided that Fred had gripped us most of all. He had been a wild, untrained, harum scarum fellow, who cared little for God or for his instructors. He had brought himself to the ​front; he was the head of a big engineering plant; he had great ambitions for the future, and he was managing his men and his boys in a masterly way; best of all he had conquered himself, and all the wild passions that seemed to rage through him were under his control. His face showed character and conquest and self-mastery. You could tell by looking at him that he was strong and dependable. He had tried the hard thing and he had made good at it, while Ed was just as he used to be. He had got nowhere; he had no ambition to get anywhere. He had not sacrificed; he had not suffered, and for him there had been no development. And so as we thought it all over we decided that the man who had changed the most had done best. It is struggle that turns the hair gray and eats furrows into the face and bends the shoulders. All these suggest accomplishment and so are venerable and beautiful.
The man who is looking for the snap, for the soft job in college and out of it, is not ​likely to get anywhere; a passive unaggressive existence means weakness and stagnation.
"No," I said to Gregg, "I can't think of any snap courses."
September
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Joiner

A DEAR old lady whom I once knew used to say in evidence of the fact that she had not wasted her eighty years, that she had never belonged to a club or been a member of a committee.
Hers was, perhaps, an extreme view to take, and one not likely to be accepted by the impulsive undergraduate. There is no doubt much to be said in favor of belonging to something. To do so may widen one's acquaintance and develop his initiative and increase his responsibility and his power of leadership, but whether it does or not very few fellows who are asked to join anything can find it in their hearts to refuse. It is a sort of flattery which we all fall for.
At this season of the year, however, when clubs are multiplying and lists of prospective members are being prepared, and the ​nets are being laid to ensnare the unsophisticated, it is possibly not unwise to sound a soft note of warning. The man who asks you to join something is like a promoter or an insurance solicitor or a book agent. He presents the invitation so skillfully that it seems like a rare privilege that one can not afford to slight, or the opportunity of a life time which one should not neglect. The prospect is alluring, but the cost is sometimes great.
One may belong to too many things. I know a number of undergraduates who belong to so many that they have time for nothing else. The joiner often has no time for his studies and no money to pay his regular bills. All his substance is wasted on his organizations, and all he has to show is a few flunks, some unpaid bills, and a collection of curiously designed pins.
Don't join anything that you haven't time to help, and don't join anything that can not be of some real service to you. A good ​many of our undergraduate organizations are groping about with the hope that they may ultimately find some real purpose for existing besides contributing to the support of fraternity jewelers and getting their photographs in the class annual. I am repeatedly besought to suggest some real object in life for a dozen different organizations which have not yet stumbled upon anything worth doing. Joining becomes with many fellows a fad and an obsession. It overshadows every other ambition and desire. It may be good to join something, but it is imbecility to join everything.
September