Life & Wisdom Quote by William Cowper

Rest is the enemy in Cowper's line, not because sleep is sinful, but because zeal is contagious. "No wild enthusiast could rest" frames enthusiasm as a kind of fever: self-consuming, sleepless, unable to settle into private conviction. The phrase "wild enthusiast" carries an 18th-century sting. "Enthusiasm" wasn’t the cute synonym for passion it is now; it was often shorthand for religious extremism, over-heated conscience, the sort of certainty that outruns reason and social order. Cowper, a poet deeply shaped by evangelical currents and by his own bouts of mental anguish, knows that fervor can feel like moral clarity while behaving like compulsion.

The pivot comes with "till half the world like him was possessed". Possessed is doing double duty. It suggests demonic takeover (the era's favored metaphor for fanaticism), but it also hints at property and conquest: the enthusiast wants converts the way an empire wants territories. The subtext is less "belief is bad" than "belief that requires replication is dangerous". Cowper sketches the missionary impulse as a psychological itch that can only be soothed by turning other people into mirrors.

Context matters: Britain in Cowper's lifetime lived through revivalism, political agitation, and fears of crowd behavior. The line reads like a warning about movements that mistake expansion for proof. It’s a miniature anatomy of ideological hunger: faith becomes a numbers game, and the enthusiast can’t be at peace until the world is remade in his own image.