Life & Wisdom Quote by William Cowper

Cowper gives “desultory man” a gentle roast, then turns the roast into a kind of absolution. The line flatters the reader’s restlessness even as it names it: desultory, scattered, hopping from one stimulus to the next. In the 18th-century moral universe, that mental itch could read as vice - fickleness, vanity, spiritual distraction. Cowper doesn’t deny the diagnosis; he simply reroutes the cause. If we’re “pleased with novelty,” perhaps that isn’t a failure of character so much as part of the operating system. The world, he suggests, is built with enough variety to meet us where we are.

That move matters. It’s a theological argument disguised as a nature note: creation as deliberate abundance, not decorative excess. The phrasing “might be indulged” is doing sly work. Indulgence can sound like permission, even pampering, but it also implies supervision - a parent tolerating a child’s fidgeting, a God allowing curiosity without letting it become chaos. Cowper, often preoccupied with conscience and spiritual anxiety, finds a compromise between austerity and appetite: you can roam, but your roaming has a place within design.

There’s also an aesthetic politics here. In an age of catalogs, gardens, and expanding horizons - the Enlightenment’s hunger for classification paired with its taste for the picturesque - Cowper sanctifies the impulse to look again. Variation becomes not a distraction from meaning but one of the ways meaning is delivered: attention as a moral practice, novelty as bait for contemplation.