They are correct in scholarship and idiom, but lack the nature and the
fire of the old Grecian bard.
The rest of his life was busy, but sad--a constant effort to drive away
madness by incessant labor. The loss of his friend, Mrs. Unwin, in 1796,
affected him deeply, and the clouds settled thicker and thicker upon his
soul. In the year before his death, he published that painfully touching
poem, _The Castaway_, which gives an epitome of his own sufferings in the
similitude of a wretch clinging to a spar in a stormy night upon the
Atlantic.
His minor and fugitive poems are very numerous; and as they were
generally inspired by persons and scenes around him, they are truly
literary types of the age in which he lived. In his _Task_, he resembles
Thomson and Akenside; in his didactic poems, he reminds us of the essays
of Pope; in his hymns he catered successfully to the returning piety of
the age; in his translations of Homer and of Ovid, he presented the
ancients to moderns in a new and acceptable dress; and in his Letters he
sets up an epistolary model, which may be profitably studied by all who
desire to express themselves with energy, simplicity, and delicate taste.
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