There is fanaticism in this no doubt: but in justice to the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from which even the most liberal morality might recoil.
In his writings generally, but especially in _The Task_, Cowper, besides being an apostle of virtuous retirement and evangelical piety, is, by his general tone, an apostle of sensibility.

_The Task_, is a perpetual protest not only against the fashionable vices and the irreligion, but against the hardness of the world; and in a world which worshipped Chesterfield the protest was not needless, nor was it ineffective.

Among the most tangible characteristics of this special sensibility is the tendency of its brimming love of humankind to overflow upon animals, and of this there are marked instances in some passages of _The Task_.
I would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
Of Cowper's sentimentalism (to use the word in a neutral sense), part flowed from his own temperament, part was Evangelical, but part belonged to an element which was European, which produced the _Nouvelle Heloise_ and the _Sorrows of Werther_, and which was found among the Jacobins in sinister companionship with the cruel frenzy of the Revolution.

Cowper shows us several times that he had been a reader of Rousseau, nor did he fail to produce in his time a measure of the same effect which Rousseau produced; though there have been so many sentimentalists since, and the vein has been so much worked, that it is difficult to carry ourselves back in imagination to the day in which Parisian ladies could forego balls to read the _Nouvelle Heloise_, or the stony heart of people of the world could be melted by _The Task_.
In his versification, as in his descriptions, Cowper flattered himself that he imitated no one.

But he manifestly imitates the softer passages of Milton, whose music he compares in a rapturous passage of one of his letters to that of a fine organ.