The poet who became the favorite of moderate sentimentalists, in what were called “genteel” circles, was William Cowper.  He presented little or nothing that could affright the gentle emotions, and much that pleasurably stimulated them.  He enriched the poetry of the domestic affections, and had a vein of sadness which occasionally, as in To Mary, deepened into the most touching pathos.  In The Task, a discursive familiar essay in smooth-flowing blank verse, he dwelt fondly upon those satisfactions which his life of uneventful retirement offered; intimated that truth and wisdom were less surely found by poring upon books than by meditating among beloved rural scenes; and, turning his sad gaze toward the distant world of action, deplored that mankind strained “the natural bond of brotherhood” by tolerating cruel imprisonments, slavery, and warfare.  Such humanitarian views, when they seek the aid of religious ethics, ought normally to find support in that sentimentalized Christianity which professes the entire goodness of the human heart; but the discordant element in Cowper’s mind was his inclination towards Calvinism, which goes to the opposite extreme by insisting on total depravity.  Personally he believed that he had committed the unpardonable sin (against the Holy Spirit),—­a dreadful thought which underlies his tragic poem, The Castaway; and probably unwholesome, though well-intentioned, was the influence upon him of his spiritual adviser, John Newton, whose gloomy theology may be seen in the hymn, The Vision of Life in Death.  Cowper’s sense of the reality of evil not only distracted his mind to madness, but also prevented him from carrying his sentimental principles to their logical goal.  What the hour demanded were poets who, discountenancing any mistrust of the natural emotions, should give them free rein.  They were found at last in Burns and in Blake.

The sentimentalists had long yearned for the advent of the ideal poet.  Macpherson had presented him,—­but as of an era far remote; latterly Beattie, in The Minstrel, had set forth his growth under the inspiration of Nature,—­but in a purely imaginary tale.  Suddenly Burns appeared:  and the ideal seemed incarnated in the living present.  The Scottish bard was introduced to the world by his first admirers as “a heaven-taught ploughman, of humble unlettered station,” whose “simple strains, artless and unadorned, seem to flow without effort from the native feelings of the heart”; and as “a signal instance of true and uncultivated genius.”  The real Burns, though indeed a genius of song, was far better read than the expectant world wished to believe, particularly in those whom he called his “bosom favorites,” the sentimentalists Mackenzie and Sterne; and his sense of rhythm and melody had been trained by his emulation of earlier Scotch lyricists, whose lilting cadences flow towards him as highland rills to the gathering torrent.  Sung to the notes of his native tunes, and infused with