"Cowper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; —not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... much about him as I learned afterwards, I should have looked at him with more interest. He had one of those imaginative natures, tinged by constitutional melancholy and saddened by ill health, which belong to a certain class of poets and sentimental writers, of which Pascal is a good example, and Cowper another. The world must have seemed very cruel to him. I remember that when he was a candidate for the Assembly, one of the popular cries, as reported by the newspapers of the time, was A bas le poitrinaire! His malady soon laid him low enough, for he ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... far from being one, Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more."—Cowper. ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... comparatively little time, skill or taste upon the flower-garden. Even 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 ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... of your readers supply me with information respecting the practice of appending mortuary stanzas to the yearly bills of mortality, published in many parishes; whether there are any extant specimens of such stanzas besides those memorable poems of Cowper written for the parish clerk of Northampton; and whether, also, the practice is still kept up in ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... 1727, Harte wrote an unidentified correspondent that "Mr. Pope was pleased to correct every page" of his forthcoming Poems on Several Occasions "with his own hand." Furthermore, Harte may have learned that Pope had petitioned Lady Sarah Cowper, in 1728, to use her influence to obtain him a fellowship in ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... romantic revival all this was changed. While Howard was working heroically for prison reform, and Wilberforce for the liberation of the slaves, Gray wrote his "short and simple annals of the poor," and Goldsmith his Deserted Village, and Cowper sang, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... from Cowper that my sister used to quote to us, because, she said, she often repeated it to herself, and found that ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... elegance are, as Cowper shows, the three successive purposes for which furniture was designed. And to-day the order of development remains also the order of importance. The first things to be desired in any article of furniture are durability and simple application to its purpose. These being found, a ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... to present rules, but precedents for its irregularities are to be found in the doings of the seventeenth century, notably in the trial of Spencer Cowper by the same Judge Hatsel, and I have done my best to represent the habits of those country gentry who were not infected by the evils of the later ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grows long, and I must hasten to conclude it. Read repeatedly Cowper's lively poem on conversation, which seems to me to have much of the spirit and accurate moral taste of Horace, with the elevation derived from Christianity. Read, too, if you can lay your hand on it, Bishop Horne's paper on conversation, ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... 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
... 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 books no ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... 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, "Enough; you ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... this exclusive temple of the beau monde; the gates of which were guarded by lady patronesses, whose smiles or frowns consigned men and women to happiness or despair. These lady patronesses were the Ladies Castlereagh, Jersey, Cowper, and Sefton, Mrs. Drummond Burrell, now Lady Willoughby, the Princess Esterhazy, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... employed on divine subjects, have arisen within us, on reading—which we have often done with delight—"The Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved—for in him piety inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is breathed upon us ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Cowper the poet was born here, his father was rector of the parish. Berkhamsted Castle is part of the hereditary property of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. At this castle William the Conqueror, after the battle of Hastings, met the Abbot of St. Albans with a party of chiefs and ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... been thought extraordinary that Cowper was over fifty when he published his first secular verses, but Mr. Hardy was approaching his sixtieth year when he sent Wessex Poems to the press. Such self-restraint—"none hath by more studious ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... seemingly slight 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 ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... metallic oxides, as well in consideration of the reactions as from an economical point of view. Before very long it was possible to produce, by the blast furnace, alloys of 40, 60, 80, and even 86 per cent., in using the hot air apparatus of Siemens, Cowper, and Witwell, with the employment of good coke, and principally by calculating the charges for the fusion in such a manner as to obtain an extra ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... 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. No tale of romance could ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... 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, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... doorknob. The tendency of the time is indisputably towards flurry—the flurry of business or the flurry of pleasure. I feel very sorry for these busy folk. Their energy is prodigious. But, for all that, they are losing life's best. Surely William Cowper had a secret in his soul when he told us that, in his mad career, John ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of Arcadia, Mathias, author of the "Pursuits of Literature", and Joseph Cowper, "who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir of Italian tragedy", Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia Cruscans whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked jaws in his now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... 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 appear ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... "Acow's," I returned to the ship to explore the environs of Whampoa. Our anchorage was at the head of the Reach, opposite a ship yard in "Newtown," where a large ship, the Prince de Joinville, was then in dock undergoing repairs. This yard was at that time in the possession of a Mr. Cowper, a yankee, if I am not misinformed, but had been originally established by a Chinaman. Every thing necessary for repairing a vessel appeared to be on hand, and Mr. C. was then engaged in coppering ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... types of mystical thought, it will not be necessary for me to describe her life or make extracts from her writings. The character of her quietism may be illustrated by one example—the hymn on "The Acquiescence of Pure Love," translated by Cowper:— ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... tablet to his memory, erected in 1834, with an inscription by Southey. Among the monuments one finds two names which shine, it may be said, by reflected light—that of Mrs. Draper, Sterne's "Eliza," and Lady Hesketh, Cowper's devoted friend and cousin. A bust of Southey finds a place here as a tribute of respect in his native town; and the name of Sydney Smith comes to mind, who was a prebendary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... invented by Johnson's Lichfield townsman, Dr. Robert James of the 'Medicinal Dictionary'. It was sold by John Newbery, and had an extraordinary vogue. The King dosed Princess Elizabeth with it; Fielding, Gray, and Cowper all swore by it, and Horace Walpole, who wished to try it upon Mme. du Deffand 'in extremis', said he should use it if the house were on fire. William Hawes, the Strand apothecary who attended Goldsmith, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... goddess azure-eyed, Rose to Olympus, the reputed seat Eternal of the gods, which never storms Disturb, rains drench, or snow invades, but calm The expanse and cloudless shines with purest day. There the inhabitants divine rejoice Forever.:" Cowper ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... a perfect rhyme. In the "Rape of the Lock" tea (tay) rhymes with obey, and in Cowper's verses on Alexander Selkirk sea rhymes with survey.' It is not likely that the pronunciation of the name was fixed, but there is every reason to suppose that the spellings of Peyps and Peaps were intended to represent the sound Pepes ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... time being should have and enjoy it for the accommodation of their offices." Soon after his appointment to the seals, Somers took possession of this mansion at the north-west corner of the Fields; and after him Lord Keeper Sir Nathan Wright, Lord Chancellor Cowper, and Lord Chancellor Harcourt used it as an official residence. But the arrangement was not acceptable to the legal dignitaries. They preferred to dwell in their private houses, from which they were not liable to be driven by a change of ministry or a grist of popular disfavor. In ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... on one's fingers," said the Cowper Commission in 1887, "the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been made by the landlord." The Irish landlord class never did a thing for Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood—to rob ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... laugh at winter when we hear The grim old churl about our dwellings rave: Thou, from that "ruler of the inverted year," Shalt pluck the knotty sceptre Cowper gave, And pull him from his sledge, and drag him in, And melt the icicles from ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... 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 of admiration. The two lines 'Ne'er sighed at the sound', &c., are, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 sunrise to make my first acquaintance ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... George was the most awful disaster that had hitherto happened to the Royal Navy. William Cowper the poet, as soon as the sad news was brought to him, wrote a solemn poem entitled "The Loss of the Royal George," from which it seems that Admiral Kempenfelt was in his cabin when the great ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... took place which disorganised the service, and the occasion is one on which the guards and coachmen distinguished themselves. The strain thrown upon the horses in a like situation is well described by Cowper, if we change one word in his lines, which are ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... 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
... And ever as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on Conversation. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for dinner—the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... he gave way to the impulses of 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... versification." This "full and fair exercise" became a despised, almost a lost, tradition after Chaucer's death. The rhythms of Skelton, of Surrey, and Wyatt, were produced on alien and narrower lines. Revived by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans, it fell into contempt again until Cowper once more began to claim freedom for English rhythm, and after him Coleridge, and the despised Leigh Hunt. But never has its full liberty been so triumphantly asserted as by the three poets I have named above. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Partly accident, and partly persevering ingenuity, extracted from the family chests the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who long remained the model of letter-writing. The letters of Hughes and Shenstone, of Gray, Cowper, Walpole, and others, self-painters, whose indelible colours have given an imperishable charm to these fragments of the human mind, may close our subject; printed familiar letters now enter into the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... much more offended at the Coronation with the ladies that did walk, than with those that walked out of their place; yet I was not so perilously angry as my Lady Cowper, who refused to set a foot with my Lady Macclesfield; and when she was at last obliged to associate with her, set out on a round trot, as if she designed to prove the antiquity of her family by marching ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... translators, Smart and Boscawen, have rendered the whole, or nearly the whole of these poems in that and no other way: Francis occasionally adopts it, though he generally uses the longer measure: Swift and Pope, as every one knows, employ it in three or four of their imitations: Cowper, in his original poems perhaps the greatest master we have of the Horatian style, translates the only two satires he has attempted in the shorter form: Mr. Martin uses it as often as he uses the heroic: perhaps Mr. Howes is the only translator since Creech who ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... bishop of the broken remnant of the Catholic Church of Scotland: he is known as the author of a very humorous ballad called "The Wee bit Wifickie," and as the translator of one of the books of the Iliad, in opposition to Cowper.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and 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 ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... accompaniments, be assured they were of His permitting; all was planned—wisely, kindly planned. Question not the unerring rectitude of His dealings. Though apparently absent, He was really present. The apparent veiling of His countenance is only what Cowper calls "the severer aspect of His love." Kiss the rod that smites—adore the hand that lays low. Pillow thy head on that simple, yet grandest source of composure—"The Lord reigneth!" It is not for us to venture to dictate what the procedure ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... incapable of acquiring any new impressions. He merely elaborates and displays the stores he has garnered up in his youth. There are indeed some rare exceptions to the rule; but few, very few, can learn a language after the age of forty. 'Tis true that Cowper did not commence the composition of his delightful poems till he had attained that age; but then it must be remembered that he had previously passed a life of study and preparation, and that he merely gave the honey ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... Cowper et ejus uxor Margarita pronubae horribiles, et instigant mulieres ad fornicandum cum quibuscunque laicis, religiosis, fratribus minoribus, et nisi fornicant in domo sua ipsi diffamabunt nisi voluerint dare eis ad voluntatem eorum; et vir est pronuba uxori, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... while Byron's Scourge hangs over his 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 Language. . ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... deemed such dainty fare, That ev'ry prudent traveller His wallet loads with many a crust. COWPER. ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... earliest result indeed of his deliverance, and the popularity which it enjoyed from the first proves that the religious sympathies of the English people were still mainly Puritan. Before Bunyan's death in 1688 ten editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress" had already been sold; and though even Cowper hardly dared to quote it a century later for fear of moving a smile in the polite world about him, its favour among the middle classes and the poor has grown steadily from its author's day to our ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Senator comes who indulges in personalities toward me; in that, I feel that I am above him, and that he is my inferior. [Applause in the galleries.] Mr. President, they are not arguments; they are the resort of men whose minds are low and coarse. Cowper ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... to extend them, Saxon will be the 'cocoon' (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry—Young's, for instance, or Cowper's), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that, whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle, will be often almost exclusively ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and the lemon; but of all the delicious and soul-refreshing odours that ever titilated human nostrils, nothing surely could equal that which proceeded from the rump steak and onions. The fragrance of new mown hay, which Cowper has so beautifully mentioned, had palled on Joe's senses; but when would the fragrance of that dish pall on the ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... certain, is both monarchical and hereditary in one family. There is not the smallest reason to think that the Otaheitans, with all their ingenuity and love of freedom, are, any more than other people, exempt from those principles so vigorously depicted by Cowper in his "Task," as the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... lost! Her head adorned with lappets, pinned aloft, And ribands streaming gay, superbly raised, Indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand For more than half the tresses it sustains."—COWPER. ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... Philip and Mary. Between Edward Shelley of Worminghurst, in the county of Sussex, Esqre., of the one part, and Rd. Cowper and Wm. ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... character, and it must be "construed liberally to carry out the beneficent principles it was intended to embody," (Dwarris on Statutory Law, p. 632,) and that "its construction must be extended to other cases within the reason and rule of it." (Lord Mansfield in Atcheson vs. Everett, Cowper, 382, 391.) Lieber's fourteenth rule ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... middle 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 is shoveled every year the blood, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... some things. They may have been so trained, for instance, that they are quite tender in regard to the feelings of others, and even those of animals. There are many who, with Cowper, "would not enter on their list of friends the man who needlessly sets foot upon a worm," who are yet very far from possessing much real conscientiousness. Their feeling is better entitled to the name ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... 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 ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... goddess azure-eyed, Rose to Olympus, the reputed seat Eternal of the gods, which never storms Disturb, rains drench, or snow invades, but calm The expanse and cloudless shmes with purest day. There the inhabitants divine rejoice Forever"—Cowper. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... come freshest to memory in this connection. For a period of fifty years Stothard stands pre-eminent in illustrated literature. Measuring time by poets, he may be said to have lent something of his fancy and amenity to most of the writers from Cowper to Rogers. As a draughtsman he is undoubtedly weak: his figures are often limp and invertebrate, and his type of beauty insipid. Still, regarded as groups, the majority of his designs are exquisite, and he possessed one all-pervading ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... thought, and through affection and godliness still deeper and more quick, has charmed and soothed them, will not be surprised to learn that she is not only poetical, but, what is more, a poet, and one as true as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, or our own Cowper; for, with all our admiration of the searching, fearless speculation, the wonderful power of speaking clearly upon dark and all but unspeakable subjects, the rich outcome of 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' which increases ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... beast, with a hey, with a hey, Has houses twain in's chest, with a ho; O Cowper, Hughes, and Snow, Stop thief with raree ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... [466] Cowper wrote to S. Rose on May 20, 1789:—'Browne was an entertaining companion when he had drunk his bottle, but not before; this proved a snare to him, and he would sometimes drink too much.' Southey's Cowper, vi. 237. His De Animi ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the most beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of the book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter of that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible weariness. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... acquaintance I must not forget Mr. Samuel Cowper (Cooper), the prince of limners of this last age, who drew his picture as like as art could afford, and one of the best pieces that ever he did which his Majesty, at his returne, bought of him, and conserves as one of his greatest rarities in his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... happily written. I was surprised at the quantity of information you had got together. I cannot help you to any detailed account of the Maccaroni preachers. They are glanced at in the second book of Cowper's Task. They have existed, and will exist in every generation, but it is seldom that any record is preserved of them. They are the butterflies of the hour. There are no means by which you can keep worthless men from making a trade of religion, and as long as there are people ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... affectionately cherish. For the service which he rendered to the cause which we also love, we will be devoutly thankful. If we have gotten any good from the life which he lived before us, we can show it by the growing warmth and completeness of our own enlistment in the same cause. Cries Mrs. Browning at Cowper's grave: ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... illustration. He was incessant in industry; indeed, his ordinary recreation at any time was only a change of work from one design to another. So were wrought out the (incomplete) series of plates for Young's 'Night Thoughts'; the drawings for Hayley's 'Life of Cowper,' and for the same feeble author's 'Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals'; the 'Dante' designs: the 'Job' series of prints; a vast store of aquarelle and distemper paintings and plates, and a whole gallery of "portraits" derived from sitters ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Assistant; or, Stories for Children was, it appears, published in two parts, making three small duodecimo volumes. The price, bound, was six shillings. There was no author's name; but it was said to be "by E.M." (i.e. Edgeworth, Maria), and the publisher was Cowper's Dissenter publisher, Joseph Johnson of No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard. Part I. contained "The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth"; "The Orange Man; or, the Honest Boy and the Thief"; "Lazy Lawrence"; "Tarleton"; and "The False Key"; ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... very personal experience went to the making of it—experience of a sort that was sure to be revived at Tew, where "so good a relick of the old times" was not likely to be wanting. It was a house, at any rate, for the "modest man" to whom, as to the poet Cowper, public appearances were so many penances; for though the world may not agree with Earle as to the degree in which this quality sets off a man, there is no question of Lord Falkland's welcome of the modest man, even if that grave divine "Mr. Earles," did not point out this diffident ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... bright the dear illusion seems, Thou wouldst be partner of thy poet's dreams, And hang in rapture on his bloodless charms, Or die, like Raphael, in his angel arms, Go and enjoy thy blessed lot,—to share In Cowper's gloom or ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Cowper came was one very adverse to him, and at the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, by the arch-versifier ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Cowper never, when it was possible to perform his task, excused his frail and desponding body from attendance in his little summer-house, morning and afternoon, until his forty lines of Homer were arrayed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of it. The writer thinks he can appreciate southern kindness and hospitality. Having been born in Virginia, raised and educated in South Carolina and Kentucky, he is altogether southern in his feelings, and habits, and modes of familiar conversation. He can say of the south as Cowper said of England, 'With all thy faults I love thee still, my country.' And nothing but the abominations of slavery could have induced him willingly to forsake a land endeared to him by all the associations of childhood ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... are generally of a moral and religious caste, and include scraps from Young, Milton, Addison, Burns, Cowper, Watts, Akenside, Pope, Byron, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... flattering myself that we should proceed comfortably and rapidly, I gave orders to march. After much continued difficulty in urging and assisting our horses to drag the cart through the boggy road, we arrived, at about one o'clock in the morning, at Cowper's Plains, about ten ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... monastery at St. Albans; Sir John Maundeville, once called the "father of English prose," was, according to his own narrative, born at St. Albans and, if we may trust an old inscription, was buried in the abbey;[2] Dr. Cotton, the poet, lived and died in the same town, where the poet Cowper lodged with him at the "Collegium Insanorum". Bacon lived at Gorhambury and was buried in the neighbouring church of St. Michael. Bulwer Lytton lived and wrote at Knebworth, where he was visited by Forster, Dickens and others. George Chapman translated ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... and countries,—he who to his dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that his first volume of "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... turned out to-day to be a volume of the Book of Life, that the whole place was alive with the calling of old voices. At the little church there across the meadows the portly, tender-hearted, generous Charles James Fox had wedded his bride. Here, in the pool below, Cowper's dog had dragged out for him the yellow water-lily that he could not reach; and in the church itself was a little slab where two tiny maidens sleep, the sisters of the famous Miss Gunnings, who set all hearts ablaze by their beauty, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... 1686. His christian name does not appear in the pedigrees of the Clinche or Clench family of Bealings and Holbrook, co. Suffolk, in the Heralds' Visitations, in the British Museum. His daughter married Roger Donne, Esq., of Ludham, co. Norfolk, and was the maternal grandmother of the poet Cowper. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... with mechanical inking appliances were devised and patented, the most notable of which were those of Rutt, Bacon, Cowper, Applegath, and Napier, but the mechanical imperfections of these presses unfitted them for the better grades ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... 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, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... sense of the word, which actually write the message as with a pen, and make a copy or facsimile of the original, have been invented from time to time. Such are the "telegraphic pen" of Mr. E. A. Cowper, and the "telautographs" of Mr. J. H. Robertson and Mr. Elisha Gray. The first two are based on a method of varying the strength of the current in accordance with the curves of the handwriting, and making the varied current actuate by means of magnetism a writing ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... remarkable of such instances was that of the Reverend John Newton of Olney, the friend of Cowper the poet. It was long subsequent to the death of both his parents, and after leading a vicious life as a youth and as a seaman, that he became suddenly awakened to a sense of his depravity; and then it was that the lessons which his mother ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the representatives of a free people. Turn to any of the works which describe the manners of the age, from the works of Richardson or Fielding, to the bitter satire of Churchill and the melancholy remonstrances of Cowper, and you are struck with the delineation of a state and manners, and a tone of feeling which, in the present day, appears scarcely credible. "'Sdeath, madam, do you threaten me with the law?" says Lovelace to the victim of his calculating and sordid violence. Throughout ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism. Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. The Psalmist: a Collection of Hymns. Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools. Memoir of Amos Lawrence. Poetical Works of Milton, Cowper, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes. Arvine's Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes. Ripley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans. Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig. Roget's Thesaurus of English Words. Hackett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ. Siebold and Stannius's Comparative ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... not only of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... advances, emphasises this effect. Within, the church is winning, too, with its ample arches, perfect proportions, and that aesthetic satisfaction that often attends the cruciform shape. An interesting monument of the Cowper and Coles families is preserved in the south transept—three full-size coloured figures. In the north transept is a spiral staircase leading to the tower, and elsewhere are memorials of the Fords and Featherstonhaughs of Up-Park, a superb domain over the brow of Harting's Down, and of the Carylls ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... initials at the foot of the letter are those of William Cowper and Mary Unwin, a ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... O days of Heaven, and nights of equal praise! Serene and peaceful as those heavenly days When souls drawn upwards in communion sweet, Enjoy the stillness of some close retreat, Discourse, as if releas'd and safe at home, Of dangers past, and wonders yet to come-(Cowper). ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in his least premeditated work, his Prayers and Meditations. They take rank in my mind with the very best things of their kind, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, The Confessions of Rousseau, and similar books. They are healthier than any of their rivals. William Cowper, that always fascinating poet and beautiful letter writer, more than once disparaged Johnson in this connexion. Cowper said that he would like to have "dusted Johnson's jacket until his pension rattled in his pocket," for what he had said about Milton. He read some extracts, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... I, "your present feeling toward this Southern lady may insensibly lead you to believe that it is right to own a fellow-creature. Does not Cowper say,— ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honorable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... "The poet Cowper was a great friend to animals. Many of his most beautiful letters to his friends have very pleasant passages about his pretty tortoise shell kitten, and his distress that she would grow up into a ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... boast Their noble birth: conduct us to the tombs Of their forefathers, and from age to age Ascending, trumpet their illustrious race." COWPER. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of Sussex long preserved an infamous notoriety. Chancellor Cowper, when a barrister on circuit, wrote to his wife in 1690, that "the Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will in habit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The country is a sink of about fourteen miles ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... disposition to deny him genius in any respect. He is now commonly spoken of as "a man of high poetical talent, very 'correct,' with a warm appreciation of the beauty of nature and great descriptive powers, but rather too much of the old-school manner of Cowper, Goldsmith and Young." This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Mr. Bryant has genius, and that of a marked character, but it has been overlooked by modern schools, because deficient in those externals which have become in a measure ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... get hold of two foxes this week—a fine dog fox and his vixen wife; and among other things, I have been looking up Cowper's glands, the supposed absence of which in the dogs has always "gone agin' me." Moreover, I have found them (or their representatives) in the shape of two small sacs, which open by conspicuous apertures into the urethra immediately behind the bulb. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... that Mrs. Mott might have the full sunlight. So cheery a nature must have sunshine. Here life went on quietly and happy. Many papers and books were on her table, and she read carefully and widely. She loved especially Milton and Cowper. Arnold's Light of Asia was a great favorite in later years. The papers were sent to hospitals and infirmaries, that no good reading might be lost. She liked to read aloud; and if others were busy, she would copy extracts to read to them when they were at leisure. Who can measure the power of ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... 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 ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Rev. John Newton, was a smoker, and so was Cowper's other clerical friend, that learned and able Dissenter, the Rev. William Bull, whose whole mien and bearing were so dignified that on two occasions he was mistaken for a bishop. Cowper appreciated snuff, but did not care for smoking, and when he wrote to Unwin, describing his new-made ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... that the ceremony could not possibly be for the fourteenth, because Countess Livia had, he now remembered, written of her engagement to meet Russett on the night of that day at a ball at Mrs. Cowper Quillett's place, Canleys, lying south of the Surrey hills: a house famed for its gatherings of beautiful women; whither Lord Fleetwood would be sure to engage to go, the admiral now said; and it racked him like gout in his mind, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with thy friends." She spake. I 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
... leads in time to the modification of borrowed words. Thus throughout the 18th century there was a struggle going on over the word balcony, which earlier was pronounced balcony. Swift is the first author quoted for the pronunciation balcony. and Cowper's balcony in "John Gilpin'' is among the latest instances of the old pronunciation. Disregarding the Latin quantity of orator and senator, English by throwing the stress on the first syllable has ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... After Goldsmith the poetic impulse seems to have decayed entirely. After the Deserted Village (1770) no striking work appeared till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope. Johnson read and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... morning. Sophia was fond of poetry that was not too difficult; and she found little disinclination in herself now to observe her father's directions about being civil to Mr Walcot. The gentleman perceived that he had won some advantage; and he persevered. He next spoke of the amiable poet, Cowper, and was delighted to find that Miss Grey was acquainted with some of his writings; that she had at one time been able to repeat his piece on a Poplar Field, and those sweet ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau |
