"Pleased by any random toy: By a kitten's busy joy, Or an infant's laughing eye Sharing in the ecstacy: I would fain like that or this Find my wisdom in my bliss: Keep the sprightly soul awake, And have faculties to take, Even from things by sorrow wrought, Matter for a jocund thought, Spite of care and spite of grief, To gambol with life's falling leaf."
Cowper's love for animals was well known. At one time, according to Lady Hesketh, he had besides two dogs, two goldfinches, and two canaries, five rabbits, three hares, two guinea-pigs, a squirrel, a magpie, a jay, and a starling. In addition he had, at least, one cat, for Lady Hesketh says, "One evening the cat giving one of the hares a sound box on the ear, the hare ran after her, and having caught her, punished her by drumming on her back with her two feet hard as drumsticks, till the creature would actually have been killed had not Mrs. Unwin rescued her." It might have been this very cat that was the inspiration of Cowper's poem, "To a Retired Cat," which had as a moral the familiar stanza:--
"Beware of too sublime a sense Of your own worth and consequence: The man who dreams himself so great And his importance of such weight, That all around, in all that's done, Must move and act for him alone, Will learn in school of tribulation The folly of his expectation."
"Come, beauty, rest upon my loving heart, But cease thy paws' sharp-nailed play, And let me peer into those eyes that dart Mixed agate and metallic ray."
"Grave scholars and mad lovers all admire And love, and each alike, at his full tide Those suave and puissant cats, the fireside's pride, Who like the sedentary life and glow of fire."
"Around in sympathetic mirth Its tricks the kitten tries: The cricket chirrups in the hearth, The crackling fagot flies."
Does this not suggest a charming glimpse of the poet's English home?
Keats was evidently not acquainted with the best and sleekest pet cat, and his "Sonnet to a Cat" does not indicate that he fully appreciated their higher qualities.
Mr. Whittier, our good Quaker poet, while not attempting an elaborate sonnet or stilted elegiac, shows a most appreciative spirit in the lines he wrote for a little girl who asked him one day, with tears in her eyes, to write an epitaph for her lost Bathsheba.