FROM THE LIBRARY OF REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON. D. D. BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY tScB THE RUSTIC BRIDGE Upon a rustic bridge. _ .if." FRONTISPIECE '1'atk. huo\ I Ckeeveris Cowpei \* £j«1 OF PR^ LBCTURB^^ y LIFE, GENIUS, AND INSANITY OF // C O W P E R. BY GEORGE B. CHEEVER, D.D., iUTOOR OF "lectures on the pilgrim's progress," "powers OF THi WORLD TO COME," " WANDERINGS OF A. PILGRIM," ETC. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS No. 2S5 BEOADWAT. 1856. rer-.ry qjg V Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Southern District of New York. CONTENTS. 4~»~» ■ — CHAPTER PAGE Introduction 6 L— Cowper's Childhood 9 II. — His Education 26 III. — State op Religion in England at the time op his Conversion 42 IV. — Literature and Genius op the Period 61 V.— His Awakening 69 VI. — His Conversion 84 VII.— His Survey of his own Case 94 Vin. — Removal to Olney 105 IX. — His Autobiography, &c 122 X. — The Mental Malady made subservient by Grace to a Sweeter Poetry 132 XI. — The Child of God walking in darkness 138 XII. — Death op Cowper's Brother 145 XIII. — Recurrence op Cowper's Malady 156 XIV. — Publication of his First Volume 166 XV. — Cowper's Satire 177 XVI. — His Humor and Pathos 188 XVII. — The Balance op Faculties in Cowper's Mind. 200 XVIIL— Composition of " The Task" 217 XIX. — Internal Conflicts and Invisible Grace 227 IV CO N T E N T S . CHAPTER PAGE XX. — Tenor of his Life and Employments 244 XXL — His Religious Enjoyment of Nature 253 XXIL— Removal to Weston 273 XXIII. — His Different Circumstances and Composi- tions Compared 288 XXIV. — The Reception of his Mother's Picture. 297 XXV. — Friendship with Hayley 320 XXVI.— Efficacy of Prayer 339 XXVII. — Lessons from Cowper's Imaginary Despair. . 347 XXVIII. — Letters and Poetry 361 XXIX. — Final Recurrence of Cowper's Malady, and his Death 380 XXX.— Conclusion 404 INTRODUCTION. A series of Lectures on the Life and Poetry of Cowper, delivered a few years since, became the origin of this present volume. On a new and more thorough examina- tion of the Autobiography and Letters of Cowper, in con- nection with the Poet's Memoir by Southey, the impression has been deepened of the injustice done to both Cowper and Newton by the tenor of that Memoir. The evil and the imperfection are in what is omitted, as well as in some things injuriously set down. The remarkable les- sons of Divine Providence and Grace, the spiritual disci- pline through which Cowper was carried, and the mani- festations of a Saviour's love to his soul, were slightly passed over, and in some cases misinterpreted and per- verted. The literary task-work of Southey, in whatever he un- dertook, was almost perfect for its exquisite ease and quietness, and for the good sense and truth of his criti- cisms, illustrated at will from the singular variety of his reading. But when he came to speak of personal religion, the good angel of his genius, if separated from the Prayer- book and the Church, seemed suddenly in gloom. Like Dante's guide, who could lead the way through hell and purgatory, but was not sufficient for the mysteries of heaven, a mind ever so cultivated and poetical, may be VI INTRODUCTION. unable to behold the thiugs of the Spirit of God, and they may even be regarded as foolishness. Thou art arrived where of itself my ken No further reaches. I with skill and art Thus far have drawn thee on. Expect no more Sanction of warning voice, or sign from me. Dante. Southey knew no more of religion, in its spiritual dis- cernment, than Virgil, unless lie had been taught it by the Spirit of God in his heart ; and if he had been thus taught, he would certainly have been more careful not to deride, or caricature, or deny, the work of the Spirit of God in other hearts. One of the main purposes in this volume has been to illustrate more fully the religious experience of Cowper, and to trace the causes and the manner of his religious gloom. Some very manifest sources or occasions of its exasperation there lie scattered along in the course and manner of his life, which might have been removed by the wisdom of experience, and would have been, could his life have been lived over again ; but the secret spring dis- ordered, the point and manner of entanglement and con- fusion, remain as much a mystery as ever, and always will. The chords of the mental harp elude the sight, and so do the pressures that interfere with its freedom and melody. The first dethronement of Cowper's reason being be- fore his conversion, his coming forth from so thick a gloom an entirely changed being, a new creature in Christ Jesus, was so surprising a phenomenon, that it is not much to be wondered at that the world could not compre- hend the scene. If Cowper had returned to his chambers in the Temple, and to his gay and irreligious life, they would have thought him perfectly cured. But it was as INTRODUCTION. Vll if some magician had come forth from a prison in the shape of an angel, and it seemed a trick of legerdemain or madness. They thought it but a change in the same tragedy, the more especially as madness has its passages from tragedy to comedy, and from comedy to tragedy. Some said his religion was owing to his madness ; some said his madness was owing to his religion ; some inti- mated both, and would not even receive his own testimony, not even after the production of a poem of such consum- mate bright perfection as " The Task" had proved that his mind was as transparent and serene in its faculties of genius and of power, almost as an angel's. But the second access of his malady came on, a second and sudden dethronement of reason, at the close of eight years of angelic light and peace, and enjoyment in Christ Jesus ; and out of that he came as with a vail over his spiritual vision, or as one bound hand and foot with grave- clothes, or as one emerging from a fog, with the remnants of the thick cloud hanging to him ; and after that, he never could recover the brightness of his former hope, nor the joy of his first experience. What a strange and melancholy intrusion of the expelled delirium, when it could go no further, when it was cured, indeed, all but that gloom ! and what a caput mortuum of despair, left in the crucible after such a fiery trial of his intellect ! A re- covery in every other respect, save only the delusion of a gloom so profound, that it produced the reality of anguish all the keener, because of the strong and undiminished affection of his heart still turned heavenward, and like the magnet of a compass as true in midnight as at noon ! His prevailing insanity, so far as it could be called in- sanity at all, in those long intervals of many years, dur- ing which his mind was serene and active, his habit of thought playful, and his affections more and more fervent, was simply the exclusion of a personal religious hope to ¥111 INTRODUCTION. such a degree as to seem like habitual despair. This de- spair was his insanity, for it could be only madness that could produce it, after such a revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ as he had been permitted in the outset to enjoy. If Paul had gone deranged after being let down from his trance and vision in the third heavens, and the type of his derangement had been the despair of ever again beholding his Saviour's face in glory, and the obstinate belief of being excluded by Divine de- cree from heaven, though his affections were all the while in heaven, even that derangement would have been scarcely more remarkable than Cowper's. In the case of so deli- cate and profound an organization as his, it is very diffi- cult to trace the effect of any entanglement or disturbance from one side or the other between the nervous and men- tal sensibilities of his frame. There was a set of Border Ruffians continually threatening his peace, endeavoring to set up slavery instead of freedom, and ever and anon making their incursions, and defacing the title-deeds to his inheritance, which they could not cany away ; and Cowper might have assured himself with the consolation that those documents could not be destroyed, being regis- tered in heaven, and God as faithful to them, as if their record in his own heart had been always visible. We have endeavored to bring into plainer observation the course of the divine discipline with this child of God walking in darkness, and to illustrate some of the neglected but pro- foundly instructive lessons of the darkness and the con- flict CHAPTER I. THE TRIALS OF COWPER'S CHILDHOOD. — COMPANIONS AND INFLU- ENCES AT SCHOOL. — HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS. The birthplace of the poet Cowper, one of the few poets in our world, beloved as well as admired by those who read him, was in the town of Great Birkhamstead, in Hertfordshire county, in En- gland. He was born in 1731, November the 15th, at the rectory of his father, Dr. John Cowper, who was chaplain to George II., and rector of Birk's Parish. Cowper's mother died at the age of thirty- four, in 1737, when the future poet was but six years of age. Yet at this early period her tender- ness and love made an impression on the whole heart and nature of her child, never to be effaced. It came out more strongly, as such early impres- sions often do, and perhaps always, when they are lasting, at a far later age. Near fifty years after his beloved mother's death, Cowper wrote " that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her ; such was the impression her tenderness made 10 CHILDHOOD OF COWPIB. upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short." John Randolph once said to an intimate friend, " I used to be called a Frenchman, because I took the French side in politics ; and though this was unjust, yet the truth is, I should have been a French atheist, if it had not been for one recol- lection ; and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers, and cause me on my knees to say, 1 Our Father who art in heaven.'" How sweet a picture of maternal tenderness and care ! Sometimes, in the midst of darkness and despondency, in after years, Randolph would write, " I am a fatalist ! I am all but friendless. Only one human being ever knew me. She only knew me !" The idea of that being who knew him in the dear relation of mother, continued to be as a guardian angel to him ; many a time it seemed the on]y separation between him and death. Oh the. power of a mother's love and prayers ! Short, indeed, was the opportunity granted to Cowper's mother to manifest her tenderness and care. Yet that opportunity was the time of ten- derest, fondest love ; between three years old and seven or eight, a mother loves her children more tenderly, and does more for the formation of their character than in any other equal period. And CHILDHOOD OF COW PER. 11 one of the reasons plainly is, because in that inter- val the development of being and of character is sweeter, fresher, more attractive and original, than in any other. The poet remembered to his latest day, with the warm memory of love, that period of an affectionate mother's gentle and incessant care. He remembered his hours in the nursery, remembered when the gardener Kobin drew him day by day to school in his own little bauble coach, carefully covered with his velvet cap and warm scarlet mantle. He remembered when he sat by his mother at her feet, and played with the flow- ers wrought upon her dress, and with imitative art amused himself and her with pricking the forms of the violet, the pink, the jasmin, into paper with a pin ; the soft maternal hand from moment to moment laid upon his head, with endearing words and smiles that went into the depths of his heart. The pastoral home of his infancy, so dear for such inexpressibly delightful hours of the en- joyment of a mother's love, was his but for a brief interval. 1 Short-lived possession ! but the record fair, That memory keeps of al) thy kindness there, Still outlives many a storm ihat has effaced A thousand other themes less deeply traced. Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid : Thy morning bounties, ere I left my home, The biscuit or confectionary plum ; 12 CHILDHOOD OF COWPEB. The fragrant waters on my cheek bestowed By thine own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed ; All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall, Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks That humor interposed too often makes ; All this, still legible in memory's page, And still to be so to my latest age, Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay Such honors to thee as my numbers may ; Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed here." The morning brightness of such a mother's love, the child, passed into a man, could not forget, though all things were forgotten. He remem- bered the sound of the tolling bells on the day of her burial, and his seeing the black hearse that bore her away slowly moving off, and the grief with which he turned from the nursery window and wept bitterly ; and he remembered how the sympathizing maidens, distressed at his sorrow, beguiled him day by day with the promise that his dear mother would soon return again, and how for a long time he believed what he so ardently wished, and from day to day was disappointed, till the expectation and the grief wore out together. 11 Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went Till, all my stock of infant sorrow spent, I learned, at last, submission to my lot, But though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot." Had Cowper's mother, so gentle, so affectionate, CHILDHOOD O J? COWPIB. 13 so careful, been spared to him, his course in life would have been very different ; but perhaps the poetical peculiarities of his nature would never have been so exquisitely developed. The crush- ing of the flower, which was to yield so precious and perpetual a fragrance, began in childhood. From the care and gentleness of such a mother, and the quiet of an English rural home so peaceful, so like an earthly paradise, the sensitive, delicate child was immediately passed to the discipline of a boarding-school. This would have been a deso- late and cruel change at best ; but to Cowper, in this case, it was terrible, for there was in the school a brute pupil of fifteen years of age, who made himself the tyrant of the younger boys with unheard-of persecutions, and for two years the sorrowful and shrinking child was the peculiar subject of this wretch's tyranny and cruelty, until, the habits of the villain being discovered, he was expelled from the school. Cowper also was re- leased, and for a couple of years was placed in the family of an eminent oculist, to be treated for a complaint threatening his eyesight. From that care and discipline he was removed, at the age of ten, and was placed at Westminster, where seven of the most important years of his life were passed in the study of the classics, till he was seventeen. His taste was cultivated, and his mind richly stored by these years of classical discipline, but 14 CHILDHOOD OF COW PER. his character was not resolutely developed, and some of the influences thrown upon it were evil. Southey has noted as a fact, that in Cowper's days there were together at the Westminster School more youths of distinguished talent than ever at any other time were cotemporaries there. Some of them were afterward his intimate com- panions in the pursuits of literature, while profess- edly engaged in the study of the law. Coleman, the play-writer, was one, whose character, along with that of Lord Thurlow, Cowper drew with some severity, when they had both unkindly neg- lected the poet, on his sending to them the first fruits of his poetical genius. " Thy schoolfellow, and partner of thy plays, When Nichol swung the birch, and twined the bays." In regard to the intimacies of his school-days, Cowper long afterward expressed nimself to his friend Mr. Unwin, "I find such friendships, though warm enough in their commencement, surprisingly liable to extinction, and of seven or eight, whom I had selected for intimates, out of about three hun- dred, in ten years' time not one was left me." He told the same friend that on his quitting West- minster, he valued a man according to liis pro- ficiency and taste in classical literature, and had the meanest opinion of all other accomplishments CHILDHOOD OF COWPER, 15 unaccompanied by that, but that he had lived to see the vanity of what he had made his pride, and to find that all this time he had spent in painting a piece of wood that had no life in it, and when he began to think indeed, he found himself in pos- session of many baubles, but not one grain of solidity in all his treasures. Yet what precious treasures did they prove, when at length, imbued with the sweetest spirit of piety, they were wrought into the most imperishable forms of English litera- ture. Cowper's English style, like Goldsmith's, seemed part of the intuitive elements of his ge- nius ; it was not formed by his classical discipline at Westminster, but grew, as an apple-blossom grows out of life, by the law of life ; for Cowper has stated in his letters some curious facts as to the general neglect of English in a school given to Latin and Greek. The very same lad, he said, was often commended for his Latin, who deserved to be whipped for his English, and not one in fifty of those who passed through Westminster and Eton, arrived at any remarkable proficiency in speaking and writing their own mother tongue. With merry playmates at Westminster, Cowper must have enjoyed many hours, notwithstanding all that he is said to have suffered, both there and at the earliest scene of his school-trials. Hayley tells us that Cowper had " been frequently heard to lament the persecution he sustained in his child- 16 CHILDHOOD UF OOWPEB. ish years, from the cruelty of his school-fellows in the two scenes of his education. His own forci- ble expression represented him at Westminster as not daring to raise his eye above the shoe-buckle of the elder boys, who were too apt to tyrannize over his gentle spirit." Cowper's own description of this misery refers only to his experience at the school for children in Hertfordshire. But Hayley seems to write from the remembrance of Cowper's conversation, and describes the same torment as endured in some degree at Westminster. There can be no doubt that in such treatment of a mind and heart so tenderly sensitive, so exquisitely deli- cate, there was gathering, even at the earliest period, that cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand, which was at length to overshadow his whole being with the blackness of a settled mad- ness and despair. The whole of his early education was certainly, in some respects, most unfortunate. Of his situa- tion in the household of the surgeon and oculist, where he went at eight years of age for medical discipline, connected with the system of education afterward pursued, he speaks himself, in brief terms, as follows : "I continued two years in this family, where religion was neither known nor prac- ticed, and from thence was dispatched to West- minster. Whatever seeds of religion I might carry thither, before my seven years' apprenticeship to CHILDHOOD OF COW PER. 17 the classics were expired, were all marred and cor- rupted. The duty of the schoolboy swallowed up every other ; and I acquired Latin and Greek at the expense of knowledge much more important/' He speaks in this connection, of some early casual impressions in regard to his own mortality, in- creased by intimations of a consumptive habit, and attended with a lowness of spirits uncommon at such an age. Certainly, it were a sufficient cause for unhappi- ness, not imaginary nor temporary, to be banished at so tender an age as Cowper was from so dear a home as his, and thrown upon the care of strang- ers in a boarding-house ; and four years, from the age of six to ten, spent so unhappily, are reason enough for that " uncommon lowness of spirits." Cowper was thrown upon himself too early, and with too entire an absence of any dear personal guide or friend, for the habit of self-reliance to grow out of such discipline. De Quincey, in some reference to the years of his childhood says, " By temperament, and through natural dedication to despondency, I felt resting upon me always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties, at- tached to life, that I never should be able to ful- fill ; a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off." Tins is a very common experience, in boys of a reflective nature, though not always remembered and defined with 18 CHILDHOOD OF COW PER. so much distinctness. Suppose it were increased to a morbid degree by circumstances, it might easily become a predisposing cause of permanent gloom assuming the type of madness. And this feeling, at a later period, was, absolutely, one of the exasperating causes of Cowper's insanity. If another human being could have been found to take the responsibility of life upon himself, Cow- per's mind would have been at ease, and no catas- trophe of madness would have happened. But, then, for aught we can see, his conscience would have remained at ease, also, and he never would have been awakened from the careless dreamings of an indolent, gay, social existence, as attractive, when its habit was once formed, as it was useless, but ruinous for his nobler and better nature. He was rudely and awfully thrown upon himself, and found himself the greatest of all burdens that the mind could bear ; yet not till despair came, abso- lute despair, was he thrown upon his Saviour, and not till then did he find rest. He has described his singular religious indiffer- ence at the age of fourteen, when seized with the small-pox, and presumed to be but a step from death. And it ivas singular, for that is an age when, in the prospect of death, conscience is ordi- narily much alarmed, and there is great anxiety, for the heart has not been hardened. But Cowper says, " Though I was severely handled by this (lis- CHILDHOOD OF COWPER. 19 ease, and in imminent danger, yet neither in the course of it, nor during my recovery, had I any sentiments of contrition, any thought of God or eternity." Cowper goes still further in the record against his boyish days, the review, from an ad- vanced and holy post of observation, of the evil habits he was then contracting. He says he was hardly raised from his bed of pain and sickness before the love of sin became stronger than ever, and the devil seemed rather to have gained than lost an advantage over him. " By this time," he says, "that is, about the age of fourteen, I be- came such an adept in the infernal art of lying that I was seldom guilty of a fault for which I could not invent an apology capable of deceiving the wisest. These, I know, are called schoolboys' tricks ; but a total depravity of principle, and the work of the father of lies, are universally at the bottom of them." Southey sets this down as a species of Protestant exaggerated self-condemnation, either hypocritical or enthusiastic, either to deceive others, or to pro- mote the cause of religion by magnifying the mira- cle of one's own conversion. It is no great com- pliment to the character of Cowper, the Christian and the poet, to intimate that he would delibe- rately and knowingly exaggerate the sins and follies of his childhood, even for the purpose of magnifying a miracle. It is no great compliment 20 CHILDHOOD OF COWPEE. to his truthfulness to intimate that he would en- deavor to set forth the miracle of his own conver- sion as greater than it really was. Southey thinks that Cowper imposed upon himself, when accusing himself as a juvenile proficient in the infernal art of lying, in a far greater degree than he had ever imposed upon an usher ; and he adds, contrary to all experience, " that lying is certainly not one of those vices which are either acquired or fostered at a public school." But how could Cowper, as a truthful man, have accused himself of lying in his childhood if he had not remembered and known that he had been guilty of that sin ? How could he impose upon himself with such a mere imagination, when he was sitting down to compose a severely truthful history ? How, above all, could he deliberately attempt to impose upon others, or to record for others' instruction, as a definite well-known point in his own early life and character, what was noth- ing better than a slander against himself ? It is a most injurious and humiliating argument by which Southey, in order to avert the charge of de- pravity from Cowper's youth, fastens that of de- ception upon Cowper's Christian manhood. And yet Southey acknowledges that " Cowper was not one of those persons who gratify their spiritual pride by representing themselves as the vilest of sin- ners/' The secret of the strange apology is in the CHILDHOOD OF COWPBB. 21 next sentence, in which Southey, because it is cer- tain that Cowper had been an inoffensive gentle boy, discards as not to be received in evidence of any such evil habit as that of falsehood, " what- ever he, in his deplorable state of mind, may have said or thought of his own childhood." Now it can hardly be credited that the state of mind which Southey here sets down as deplorable, when Cowper penned his own exquisitely beautiful and affecting memoirs, and gave the history of his childhood, was the calmest, brightest, serenest, most spiritual and heavenly period and mood of his whole life ; a state of mind, in which the presence of his Saviour was a light of glory and of joy, and the very atmosphere of his heart was as the air of heaven. It was so far from deplorable for himself, that he was always in the enjoyment of the sweet- est social and Christian communion, and in the almost uninterrupted exercise of prayer and praise. And so far from melancholy to others, that the very sight of a creature so exalted in spiritual happiness was full of interest and delight ; for he looked on all around him with celestial love, and he judged all things with a serene, unbiassed spir- itual judgment, neither censorious, nor harsh, nor gloomy, but sweetly radiant with the beauty of that happiness, through which every thought was trans- mitted. All forms of opinion, all sentences on his past life, and anticipations of his future, flew freely 22 CHILDHOOD Q F O W P B R . forth, like birds of Paradise, through an avenue of peace and joy, bearing fragrance from the trees of life on either side upon their wings. It was the experience of " the peace of God that passeth all understanding, keeping both heart and mind through Christ Jesus." And yet, Southey had the hardihood to speak of Cowper, while in the experience of such religious feeling and enjoyment, as "in his deplorable state of mind," and could say of him that " he regarded with a diseased mind his own nature and the course of human life," when he referred to the ab- sence of religion in his own childhood. It is in the same mood that Southey speaks of Cowper's interesting account of himself as "his melancholy memoirs." Repeatedly Southey speaks of the " exaggerated language" of these memoirs in re- gard to their description of the native evil of the human heart, and of the total want of religion in Cowper's own heart before his conversion. In di- rect contradiction to Cowper's own solemn affirma- tions of what he remembered in regard to his own character and condition in his childhood and youth, Southey says, " He had no cause, real or imaginary, for regret or self-reproach. He was exactly one of those boys who choose for themselves the good that may be gained at a public school, and eschew the evil, being preserved from it by their good in- stincts, or by the influence of virtuous principles CHILDHOOD OF COW PER. 23 inculcated in childhood." Whose testimony, in such a case, is to be believed ? — that of the author of the autobiography, speaking of himself, and speaking as a Christian, from a heart full of the emotions of heavenly gratitude and praise, or that of the biographer, contradicting the autobiography, and declaring that he knows more about Cowper's childhood than Oowper knew himself, and can de- scribe more truthfully than Cowper has done, the early life of the poet ? The passage in which Cowper charges upon his youthful character and years the habit of falsehood, is omitted from the autobiography in some of the editions of the poet's Life and writings. It is some- what altered even by G-rimshawe. And, indeed, it is veiy natural to wish that there had been no occasion for writing it. But we are not sitting in court, where the counsel and the judge will not admit any thing from the prisoner himself, against himself, to go to the jury. Every word is precious. The " Jerusalem sinner," the happy, forgiven, re- joicing saint in Christ Jesus, was drawing up as truthful an account as he could give of his form el- and his present self ; of his character and habits as a boy and a man, without grace, and of the great and mighty change wrought in him by grace ; and we can not but esteem it a false and ill-judged delicacy, which would suppress, or deny and contradict such a passage as this, out of a 24 CHILDHOOD OF COWPEB. supposed regard to the poet's memory. One might as well and as wisely suppress John Newton's ac- count of his manner of life while engaged in slave- trading, together with his profaneness and the vices of his character. The truth is, we would like to see, in the review of Cowper's early life, whatever Cowper himself saw, and judged it for the glory of God that others also should see and remark upon. If he had fallen into evil habits, his being rescued from them by Divine grace could not be known unless they were known. It is more to the glory of God, than it is to the disgrace of the sinner, that they should be known in every case in which the grace of God is so triumphant. The greater the guilt, the greater the grace and glory of salva- tion. "Howbeit," says Paul, "for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all long-suffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting." Paul says that God called him and forgave him, not because his sins were small and few, but many and great, that he might give point and power to that " faithful saying and wor- thy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." And David in his very prayer, "For Thy name's Bake pardon mine iniquity, for it is great," expresses the same wondrous theology, wondrous CHILDHOOD OF COWPER. 25 and always new in the world, for its amazing mercy. Let then sin have its full merit, as well as grace ; justice to the one is but justice to the other. No extenuation of human offenses, whether in boy- hood or manhood, can glorify God, but the man- ifestation of God's glory most powerfully sets off the baseness of every kind of sin, in every age and place. Set down, if you please, those equivoca- tions, deceits, concealments, and false excuses, which Cowper rudely describes as the infernal art of lying ; set them down as mere harmless, boyish tricks and stratagems ; yet they show the corrupt- ing power of evil example in a public school, even upon a nature constitutionally so frank and indis- posed to falsehood as the youthful Cowper's. His character as yet, while at school, was not firm, but irresolute and yielding, and he had no religious principles or habits to bear him through tempta- tion unharmed. 2 CHAPTER II. PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND PRIVATE TUITION'. — " THE TIROCINIUM." — COW- PER'S EXPERIENCE AT WESTMINSTER. COWPER'S HABITS WHILE A STUDENT-AT-LAW. — HIS RESIDENCE IN THE TEMPLE. — HIS CON- VIVIAL AND LITERARY COMPANIONS. An admirable judge of English schools in his day, Mr. De Quincey, has expressed the opinion that Cowper was far from doing justice to the great public schools of the kingdom in his " Tiro- cinium/' or review of the school discipline. He affirms that Cowper was disqualified, by delicacy of temperament, for reaping the benefit from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own Westminster experience, he could not judge the great public schools from an impartial station ; " but I," continues he, " though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am com- pelled, in mere conscience, to give my vote (and if I had a thousand votes, to give all my votes) for the former." So, too, as between the public and private schools PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 27 that Cowper had attended, the proof in his expe- rience was in favor of the former, for he suffered much more at the private school than he did at the public. But this by no means invalidates his testimony as to the essential evils of the latter. And a system of education which proves good only for the rougher and more rugged natures and constitutions, but injurious for the shrinking, the sensitive, the gentle and refined, and for the sen- sibilities of exquisite genius hidden in its child- hood, can not, on the whole, be the best. Cowper, however, was not disqualified, either by excessive delicacy of temperament or delicacy of constitu- tion, for the rough-and-tumble even of a town school ; it was the moral influences that he com- mented upon with such just and graphic severity in " The Tirocinium,'' which is a poem recommending private tuition in preference to an education in any public school whatever. Cowper delighted in the athletic sports of boyhood, and was foremost in them for skill and energy, so that thus far, at least, it was nothing in his own idiosyncracies that created the prejudice, or unfitted him to bear an impartial testimony. But what he saw in others and knew from experience, of the injurious deso- lating moral effect, the mining and sapping of re- ligious principle, if such principle had been taught in early childhood, the precocious instruction in fashionable vices, the exclusion or dishonor of re- 28 T II K MORALITIES ligious truth and a religious example, the forming and fixing of habits and a character that, what- ever might be the sphere molded of hereditary fortune here, could prepare the being for nothing but misery hereafter ; — these are the things pre- sented with such caustic satire, and at the same time affectionate and solemn warning in this admi- rable poem. The reader of it knowing that Cow- per drew his description from reality, and that he did not exaggerate nor set down any thing in mal- ice, can not wonder at the feelings of the poet, nor at his calling the public schools menarjer' ■• TThat cause can move us (knowing as we must. That these menageries all fail their trust) To send our sons to scout and scamper there, While colts and puppies cost us so much care ?" How beautiful, how impressive, is the opening of that poem, and the argument, from which the writer deduces the rule and foundation of its criti- cisms. That vre are bound to cast the minds of youth Betimes into the mold of heavenly truth. That, taught of God, they may indeed be wise, Nor. ignorantly wand'ring, miss the skies." From the creation, the chain of reasoning pro- ceeds to man, placed by its Author as its intelli- gent, majestic head, the -state, the splendor, and OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 29 the throne being an intellectual kingdom. And thus intelligent, and standing as the crown of such a world, the wildest scorner of the laws of his Maker may, in a sober moment, find time to pause and to ask himself, why so framed and placed in such a position, so fearfully and wonderfully made ? If only to see and feel by the light of reason, and with an aching heart, the contradiction, chaos, and fury of passions which reason can indeed condemn, but can bring no force to conquer them ; if, impo- tent and self-wretched in this world, there is here no cure ; and if, when this demonstration of folly, guilt, and helplessness is at an end, there is noth- ing better beyond, or nothing at all ; then, of all the objects and creatures of this world, man stands self-impeached, though at the head of creation, the creature of least worth. " And, useless while he lives, and when he dies, Brings into doubt the wisdom of the skies ; What none could reverence, all might justly blame, And man would breathe but for his Maker's shame." But it is perfectly plain that if all the objects of the universe show forth the glory of the Maker, fulfilling some wise and obvious purpose, and demonstrating a divine intelligence and goodness, certainly not Divine unless both good and intelli- gent, then he to whom is given or appointed the dominion over such a world, has been invested 30 thi: :i B A L I I I I B with faculties and powers to fill that station for the same great purpose, and stands arrayed in his kingship of intelligence and power, that he may reflect, not less than earth, sea, and air, the attri- butes of his Creator. " That first or last, hereafter, if not here. He too might make his Author's wisdom clear ; Praise Him on earth, or, obstinately dumb, Suffer His justice in a world to come." Such is the truly sublime argument with which Cowper introduces his rugged and profoundly sa- tirical " Keview of Schools." The close of it reminds the reader of a passage in Coleridge's " Statesman's Manual," by which he means the Bible, with its les- sons of God's wisdom for man's guidance. " The root is never detached from the ground. It is God every where : and all creatures conform to His decrees, the righteous- by performance of the law, the disobedient by the sufferance of the penalty!' If such the destiny of man, then, exclaim both poets, what combined madness and dishonesty to set up any system of public education of which the end is not man's highest interest, and the means God's truth ! Now the truths (Cowper continues) found out only with great pains by men of great learning,- are not always as important as they are dear- bought. OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 31 " But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a luster, he that runs may read. - ' Here are verses from which Wordsworth might have drawn his lines : 'The primal duties shine aloft like stars, The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless, Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers." But the distinction between the two passages is that between the two poets, the one comparatively artificial and elaborately philosophic, even though full of nature and feeling, the other the poet of rural simplicity, of piety, of Scripture truth, strong, homely, natural thought, deep feeling and common sense. Both are great poets ; but no passage can be turned into prose from Wordsworth's pages that shall exhibit such a - compact argument of plain, intelligible, strong thought, with a mighty and solemn conclusion, befitting and crowning its grandeur, as is to be found in the three opening paragraphs of Cowper's " Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools." Southey speaks of the destructive influence of a public education upon those devotional habits which in a sweet Christian household may have been learned at home ; and he says that nothing which is not intentionally profane can be more ir- 32 THE MORALITIES religious than the forms of religion, which are observed at such a school as that at Westminster ; and that the attendance of schoolboys in a pack at public worship is worse than perfunctory. Yet the master at Westminster in Cowper's time, as named in the Valediction, was Dr. Nichols, apparently a conscientious man ; and Cowper afterward re- marked upon the pains he took to prepare the boys for confirmation, acquitting himself like one who had a deep sense of the importance of his work. Then, for the first time, Cowper says he attempted to pray in secret ; but being little ac- customed to that exercise of the heart, and having very childish notions of religion, he found it a dif- ficult and painful task, and was even then fright- ened at his own insensibility. " This difficulty," says he, " though it did not subdue my good pur- poses till the ceremony of confirmation was passed, soon after entirely conquered them. I relapsed into a total forgetfulness of God, with all the dis- advantages of being the more hardened for being softened to no purpose." Oh, if there could have been at this time some kind, affectionate Christian teacher and friend, to lead the awakened, trem- bling, thoughtful boy to the Saviour, what years of agony and darkness might not have been pre- vented! At Westminster, Cowper was in high favor with his master, from whom he received rewards for his of public Schools. 33 poetical Latin exercises, and among the boys he excelled at foot-ball and cricket. Neither in mind nor body, therefore, was he idle ; and from one of his later letters in the review of this early period, we learn that while at Westminster he was cured of that alarming disorder in the eyes, for which he had been two years in the house of a renowned oculist, but to no good purpose. From thence he says he went to Westminster School, where, at the age of fourteen, the small-pox seized him, and proved the better oculist of the two, for it deliv- ered him from all the inflammations to which he had been subject. He has also informed us that at the age of fourteen he first tried his hand at English verse, in a translation of one of the elegies of Tibullus. From that time Hayley says he had reason to believe that Cowper frequently applied himself to poetical efforts ; but the earliest pre- served on record is the piece on finding the heel of a shoe, which he wrote at Bath in 1748, about a year before he left Westminster. It was in blank verse, and may be regarded as shadowing forth, through an interval of near forty years, some of the admirable native characteristics of the future poet -of "The Task." At the age of eighteen, Cowper himself says that he left Westminster, a good grammarian, but as ignorant of religion as the satchel at his back. He then spent nine months at home, and after 2* 34 LAW B T U D I K S . IN some anxious deliberation, which such a step must have cost him, the profession of the law was fixed upon as the path of his future life, and he was ar- ticled with Mr. Chapman, an attorney, for three years. It was a choice most unsuited to his men- tal constitution, and his tastes and habits ; and had it not been so, the poetical development of his genius must have been prevented by the ab- sorption of his whole being in legal studies and pursuits. A genuine poet would have been sacri- ficed for the very common growth of an indifferent lawyer ; for by no possibility could Cowper have ever risen to eminence in that profession : at the uttermost he would but amiably have adorned the gift of some friendly professional sinecure. In the attorney's office, Cowper had for a fellow- clerk the celebrated Thurlow, afterward lord-chan- cellor. At a later period, Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh in reference to the tenor of his life in that three years' probation of it, that he and Thurlow were employed " from morning till night in giggling and making giggle," instead of studying law. In his own memoir of himself he says that he might have lived and died ivithout seeing or hearing any thing that might remind him of one single Christian duty, had it not been that he was at liberty to spend his leisure time (which, he says, was well-nigh all my time) at his aunt's in South- ampton Row. " By this means I had opportunity T II E M I D I) L E T 11 ftl P L E . 35 of seeing the inside oY a church, whither I went with the family on Sundays, and which, probably, I should otherwise never have seen." Cowper was twenty-one years of age when he left the attorney's office, and took rooms in the Middle Temple to continue his studies, in a man- ner, as he says, complete master of himself. And here commences the profoundly interesting and instructive account by himself of the development of his own character, and the change of his own being from carelessness to despondency, and from despondency to despair, madness, and attempted suicide ; from suicide, frustrated by the providen- tial mercy of God, he advanced to the deepest con- viction of guilt, with an apprehension of the Divine vengeance, carried for months almost to the ex- treme of despair ; from that time he was brought, by the wonderful grace of God, to a simple, hum- ble faith in the Lord Jesus, a clear, joyful, exper- imental understanding and appreciation of the conditions of salvation through his blood, and a profound peace and happiness in believing. At his residence in the Temple began the first experience of that terrible despondency of soul, which at length grew into an enshrouding mental and physical disease, broken only by the grave. Day and night he describes himself under this de- jection of spirits, as being upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair. He lost 3b' Q LOO M AND (i A V B T V . all relish even for his classical studies ; and singu- larly enough, the only book in which he took any delight was a volume of Herbert's poems, which he then first met with, and pored over him all day long. After nearly a year spent in this wretched disquietude, without any relief, he at length betook himself to prayer, that is, he com- posed what he calls a set of prayers, and made frequent use of them. About the same time, spending several months with friends at South- ampton, the cloud of insupportable gloom was very suddenly and unexpectedly removed from his soul while gazing at the lovely scenery. The de- liverance thus experienced, which at first he as- cribed to God's merciful answer to his prayers, he soon concluded to have been owing to nothing but a change of season and the amusing varieties of the place ; and he consequently argued that noth- ing but a continued circle of diversions and indulg- ence of appetite could secure him from a relapse. Acting on this principle, as soon as he returned to London he burned his prayers, and he says that inasmuch as they had been a mere prepared form, away with them went all his thoughts of devotion and of dependence upon God his Saviour. Twelve years were spent in this manner, with companions and associates who, like himself, were (in his own description) professed Christians, or else professed infidels, in what Cowper calls an GLOOM AND G A Y E T Y . 37 uninterrupted course of sinful indulgence. It is not necessary to exaggerate the meaning of this expression to all the intensity it would bear ; on the contrary, this would be false and unjust. To the awakened conscience and the smitten heart, beneath the sense of God's holiness, the uninter- rupted pursuit of worldly enjoyment^ though in the most moral style, without grossness, and in the best possible taste and dignity, would appear in reality an uninterrupted course of sinful indulg- ence. There may be the supreme worship of self, and a heart wholly unchanged by grace, even in connection with the most irreproachable morality. We suppose that Cowper's life was, briefly, that of a gay, careless man, a man of the world ; and he declares that he obtained at length so complete a victory over his conscience that all remonstrances from that quarter were vain, and in a manner si- lenced. Yet, in the company of deists, when he heard the Gospel blasphemed, he never failed to assert the truth of it with much vehemence, and was sometimes employed, when half intoxicated, in vindicating the truth of Scripture. A deistical friend, on one such occasion, answered his argu- ments by declaring that if what he said was true then he was certainly damned by his own showing and choosing. In 1754, at the age of twenty-three, with such habits begun, he was admitted to the bar, and in 38 RESIDENCE IN THE TEMPLE. 1756 suffered the loss of his father ; an affliction of which he does not once speak in his memoirs of himself, nor, singularly enough, do we ever find him adverting to it in any of his letters, save only on one occasion, in a letter to his friend Mr. Kose, in 1787. " A sensible mind can not do violence even to a .local attachment, without much pain. When my father died, I was young, too young to have reflected much. He was rector of Berkham- stead, and there I was born. It had never oc- curred to me that a parson has no fee-simple in the house and glebe he occupies. There was nei- ther tree, nor gate, nor stile, in all that country, to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace. I was sent for from London to attend him in his last illness, and he died just before I arrived. Then, and not till then, I felt for the first time that I and my native place were disunited forever. I sighed a long adieu to fields and woods, from which I once thought I should never be parted, and was at no time so sensible of their beauties as just when I left them all behind me, to return no more." Three years afterward he removed to the Inner Temple, and at the age of twenty-eight was made Commissioner of Bankrupts. He was at this time strongly attached to one of his cousins, a most in- telligent, interesting, and lovely person, Miss The- odora Cowper, whom he would have married, for RESIDENCE IN THE TEMPLE. 39 her own affections were as deeply concerned as his ; but the father absolutely refused his consent on account of their relationship. It was a deep, painful, disastrous disappointment, and unques- tionably increased for a season his constitutional tendency to gloom and depression. He expressed his feelings in some affecting verses, which were sent to Lady Hesketh, the sister of the young lady whom he loved. During his twelve years' residence in the Tem- ple, he was member of a club consisting of several literary gentlemen, among whom were Thornton, Colnian, Lloyd, and Joseph Hill, Esq., Cowper's constant correspondent for thirty years. Wilkes and Churchill, whose vigorous poetry Cow- per admired, were of the same circle of associates. The character and life of some of these men of genius have been fitly characterized in three words, thoughtless extravagance and dissipation. Lloyd died, the victim of his own excesses, at the early age of thirty-one years. Colman, after an im- moral life, died in a lunatic asylum. Such might have been Cowper's fate, had not the mercy of Divine providence and grace rescued him from a participation in such ruin. He had mixed with such companions on equal terms, Southey has re- marked, till a time of life in which habits take so strong a hold that they are not easily cast off. The period of his early intimacy with Lloyd is ^ I ft B B I DI N C E I N T II B T B M P L B . marked by a poetical epistle from Cowper to his friend in 1754, in which there occurs a reference to his own habitual depression of spirits, in lines that are to be marked as connected with the speedy development of his disorder. He remarks that he did not design, in writing verse, to rob his friend of his birthright to the inheritance, undivided, of Prior's easy jingle, nor to show his own genius or wit, possessing neither. Yet both were proved, and some of the strongest characteristics of the future poet are visible. " 'Tis not with either of these views That I presume to address the muse, But to divert a fierce banditti (Sworn foes to every thing that 's witty) That with a black, infernal train, Make cruel inroads in my brain, And daily threaten to drive thence My little garrison of sense. The fierce banditti that I mean Are gloomy thoughts, led on by spleen." The deepening of this depression into almost hor- ror and despair is marked in his own memoirs of himself, as well as the means he took to dissipate the gloom. He seems to have been for years suc- cessful in removing it, or at least keeping it at arm's length, and had it gone no further, it might have proved his irremediable ruin by continuing him in the society of his dissipated companions too long and late for any recovery. But it pleased RESIDENCE IN THE TEMPLE. 41 God that it should be permitted to deepen into absolute frenzy; and despair and suicide were made the providential angels that snatched Cow- per from destruction. CHAPTER III. STATE OF RELIGION IX ENGLAND AT THE TIME OF COWPER'S CON- VERSION. — LADY HUNTINGDON. — MR. MADAN. — LORD BOLLNG- BROKE. — DR. STONEHOUSE. — DR. COTTON. — ROMAINE. VENN. — SOME REMARKABLE INSTANCES OF GRACE. The year 1762. when Cowper was first under the cloud and passed through the sea, introductory to his being baptized, not unto Moses but into Christ, may be taken as the center of a most re- markable religious, if not literary period. We prefer it for a starting-point and vision of survey, to the year of the half century, mainly because it was nearer to the central development of the great religious awakening and revival in England, in which the revered and beloved Lady Huntingdon occupies a position so vital and important, so hon- ored and admired. And Cowper's conversion was one of the fruits of that revival, one of the precious ingatherings to the fold of the Kedeemer, under that same general dispensation of the Spirit under which Newton and Scott, Whitefield and Wesley, were made instruments of such amazing power and brightness in advancing the kingdom of God. REV. MARTIN 51ADAX. 43 Cowper's afflictions first brought him within reach of one of the eddies, as it were, of this mighty movement, in presenting him as the subject of deep spiritual distress to the Rev. Martin Madan for sympathy and guidance. Mr. Madan was a rela- tive of Cowper, being the eldest son of Colonel Madan, who married the daughter of Judge Cow- per, the brother of the lord-chancellor. Mr. Madan was one of Lady Huntingdon's preachers, so called, that is, occupying one of the chapels founded by that woman of such enlarged intelli- gence and devoted and fearless piety. Cowper had known him at an earlier period, but regarded him in the light in which all that circle of evangelical disciples of Christ were esteemed by the circle of aristocracy, wealth, and fashion, to which the poet by birth belonged, that is, as a misguided enthu- siast. Mr. Madan had been educated in the study of the law, but being convinced of his condition as a lost sinner, and brought to a knowledge of the grace of the Gospel, became a preacher of Christ crucified, and was the founder and first chaplain of the Lock Hospital, a situation which Thomas Scott, the commentator and author of " The Force of Truth," afterward filled for a season. Mr. Madan' s conversion took place about ten years before Cowper's, and Cowper regarded him, during those years, as one of the enthusiasts, in consequence. The preaching of Wesley and the 44 madan's conversion. Methodists was then attracting crowds in London, and one evening Mr. Madan, in the midst of a gay and careless circle at a coffee-house, was dispatched by his companions to go and hear Wesley, who was preaching that evening in the neighborhood, and then to come back and " take him off" for their amusement. He entered heartily into the joke, but it happened that just as he took his seat in the chapel with that purpose, Wesley was repeating his text, Prepare to meet thy God, with an intens- ity of solemnity and awe that arrested Madan's conscience at the outset. The impression deepened as Wesley went on with his rousing and fervent appeals on the destiny of the soul and the necessity of repentance ; and when Madan returned to the coffee-house, and was asked by his laughing com- panions if he had taken off the old Methodist, all the answer he could make was, " No, gentlemen, but he has taken me off/' He then left the gay circle and never returned to it, but was soon or- dained a minister of the Church of England, and preached his first sermon to a great crowd of curious, wondering listeners of all classes in All-hallows Church, Lombard-street. He was a heart-felt Christian and an able preacher, and thus was pre- pared the first Evangelist who was to meet Cowper when half distracted and trembling under the over- hanging crags and flashes of Sinai. So he met him, and preached Christ to his wounded spirit, M A DAN A N I) C W P E R . 45 then upon the verge of madness ; and immediately affer that consolation, which seemed a visible prep- aration from heaven for the storm he was to en- counter, Cowper passed into the gloom of utter insanity and despair. It was almost like putting a chronometer into the cabin of a vessel, when there were none on board of sufficient intelligence to consult it ; but w r ho can tell how far the first gleam of light, the first word of mercy, the first revelation of the Gospel, may have wrought in Cowper's heart, even during the dethronement of reason, and among his wandering thoughts pre- pared him afterward to lay hold on the hope set before him ? In a letter written to his cousin, Mrs. Cowper, the sister of Martin Madan, soon after Cowper had taken up his residence in the family of the Unwins, he described his feelings in regard to Mr. Madan, contrasting them with what they had been formerly. " Your brother Martin has been very kind to me, having written to me twice in a style which, though it was once irksome to me, to say the least, I new know how to value. I pray G-od to forgive me the many light things I have both said and thought of him and his labors. Hereafter I shall consider him as a burning and shining light, and as one of those who, having turned many to righteousness, shall shine hereafter as the stars forever and ever.'/ It was Mr. Madan by whom the instructive 46 LORD BOL IN BROKE. anecdote was preserved and related in regard to the interview between Lord Bolingbroke and Dr. Church, a 'prominent divine of the Church of En- gland, who, with Bishop Lavington and others, rejected and ridiculed the doctrines of grace. The anecdote was given to Mr. Madan by Lady Hun- tingdon herself, who received it from Lord Boling- broke. As it combines with other occurrences to form a vivid picture of the times, such as we would like to convey, it may not be a digression to repeat it. Lord Bolingbroke was employed one morning in his study reading Calvin's Institutes, when Dr. Church, a divine of the English Establishment, called on him. The deist asked the divine if he could guess what book it was that he had been studying ? " Keally, my lord, I can not," answered the doctor. u Well," said Lord Bolingbroke, " it is Calvin's Institutes. What do you think of such matters ?" " Oh, my lord, we don't think about such antiquated stuff ; we teach the plain doctrines of virtue and morality, and have long laid aside those abstruse points about grace." " Look you, doctor," said Lord Bolingbroke, " you know I don't believe the Bible to be a divine revelation ; but they loho do can never defend it on any principles but the doctrine of grace. To say the truth, I have at times been almost persuaded to believe it upon this view of things ; and there is one argument which has gone very far with me in behalf of i:s BR. STONEIIOUSE. 47 authenticity, which is, that the belief in it exists upon earth even when committed to the care of such as you, who j)retend to believe it, and yet deny the only principles on which it is defensible." Dr. Stonehouse was one of the crowd of deists who, along with Lord Bolingbroke, attacked Chris- tianity at this period, but was also one of the re- markable fruits of the mighty work of grace by which so many of the higher classes, as well as the lower, were snatched as brands from the burning. Dr. Doddridge was the happy and honored instru- ment in his conversion, and, like Mr. Madan, Dr. Stonehouse also renounced his profession and be- came a preacher of the Gospel. Dr. Cotton, the eminent physician and poet, who kept the lunatic asylum at St. Alban's, where Cowper's bark, " though tempest-tossed and half a wreck," was to find shelter, was a friend of Dr. Stonehouse, and by him was introduced to the notice of Lady Hunt- ingdon, about ten years before Cowper came under his care. On the publication of Cotton's volume of poems, " The Visions in Verse," the author sent a copy to her ladyship, who, with her accus- tomed sweetness, delicacy, and faithfulness, on acknowledging the receipt of the volume, pointed out to the amiable author what she felt to be its deficiencies (considering its subjects) in conse- quence of the absence of religious truth. Dr. Cot- ton received her remarks most kindly, and Lady 48 D B . CUT T O N . Huntingdon thus speaks in one of her letters in regard to the incident. " I am glad that my good friend was not offended at my late well-meant ad- monition and reproof. We must be faithful to each other, or else how can we expect to meet with joy at the great tribunal ? I trust he will yet be enabled to see by faith the Lord's Christ. Blessed be God, in Him all fullness dwells, of merit and righteousness, of grace and salvation, and this for the vilest of the vile, for whoever will. 0, then, my friend, " If haply still thy mental shade Dark as the midnight gloom be made, On the sure faithful arm Divine Firm let .thy fastening trust recline. The gentlest Sire, the best of Friends, To thee nor loss nor harm intends. Though toss'd on a tempestuous main, Xo wreck thy vessel shall sustain. Should there remain of rescuing grace No glimpse, no footsteps left to trace, Hear the Lord's voice ; 'tis Jesus's will ; Believe, thou poor dark pilgrim, still. " Thus much I have written to my worthy friend at St. Alban's, and I trust God will bless my poor unworthy services to his eternal good. I long to see his line genius consecrated to the best of causes, the glory of our incarnate God, and the salvation of souls redeemed by His most precious blood.*' If these lines ever fell under the notice of Cow- per, during the darkness of his mental shade. GOSPEL MYSTERY. 49 nothing could be more admirably adapted to his case than the instruction so conveyed. Lady Huntingdon at one time sent to Dr. Cot- ton the religious work of Marshall, entitled "The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification." Dr. Cotton entered into some little controversy with his friend Hervey, the author of the " Meditations/' in re- gard to Marshall's sentiments, which he thought unscriptural and unreasonable. Mr. Hervey en- deavored to enlighten Cotton's mind as to the truths of the Gospel as set forth in the work by Marshall, but with what success we know not. Cowper understood and admired the volume, if Cotton did not ; and very likely it was in the lu- natic asylum, and under Dr. Cotton's care, that he met with it ; so that Lady Huntingdon's gift reached the right recipient, a heart prepared for it, and one that needed it. Cowper says, in one of his letters, " Marshall is an old acquaintance of mine. I have both read him and heard him read with pleasure and edification ; the doctrines he maintains are, under the influence of the Spirit of Christ, the very life of my soul and the soul of all my happiness. I think Marshall one of the best writers, and the most spiritual expositor of the Scriptures I ever read." The characteristics of this era of the Holy Spir- it's power in England can not be better conveyed than by the relation of some of the extraordinary 3 50 CONVERSION OF THORPE. cases of conversion through the preaching of White- field, Boinaine, Wesley, and others. One of the most singular was that of Mr. Thorpe, who after- ward became an effective minister of that Gospel which at first he ridiculed. He was one of White- field's most insulting opposers, and possessing an unusual talent for mimicry, he not only inter- rupted his sermons in public, but ridiculed them in private in convivial theatrical circles. On one occasion, at such a gathering for pleasure, revelry, and wit, he and three of his companions laid a wager for the most effective imitation and ridicule of Whitefield's preaching. Each was to open the Bible at random and preach an extempore ha- rangue from the first verse that presented itself, and the audience were to adjudge the prize after hearing all. Thorpe's three competitors each went through the game with impious buffoonery, and then it came his turn. They had the table for their rostrum, and as he stepped upon it, con- fident of his superior ability, Thorpe exclaimed, "I shall beat you all." They handed him the Bible, and when he opened it, the invisible provi- dence of God directed his eye at the first glance to the verse in the thirteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel, "Except ye repent ye shall all likewis'e perish." He read the words, but the moment he had uttered them he began to see and to feel their full import. The swgrd of the Spirit in that pass- CONVERSION OF THORPE. 51 age went through his soul as a flash of lightning, revealing and consuming. An instantaneous con- viction of his own guilt as a sinner against God seized hold upon hint, and conscience was aroused, as it sometimes is, suddenly and unexpectedly, and always will be when God sets our sins before us in the light of His countenance. The retribu- tion in that passage he felt was for himself, and its terrors glared upon him in array against his own soul, and out of that rapid and overwhelming conviction he preached. The truths of guilt, death, eternity, and the judgment to come, were never proclaimed in gloomier aspect, for there was no mixture of grace with them. Yet he frequently afterward declared that if ever in his life he preached by the assist- ance of the Spirit of God, it was at that time. The whole subject was revealed before him, the necessity of repentance, the threatened perdition of the soul, the terrors of the second death ; and he preached to his companions, guilty, reprobate, and dying, as himself reprobate and dying. His fer- vor and fire increased as he went on, and the sym- pathetic gloom of his audience deepened the con- victions on his own soul, and the sentences fell from his lips with such intense and burning im- agery, and such point, pungency, and power of language, that, as he afterward related, it seemed to him as if his own hair would stand erect with 52 REV. MB. BOMAIMI. terror at their awfulness. It was as a blast from the lake burning with fire and brimstone. Yet no man interrupted him, for all felt and saw, from the solemnity of his manner, what an overwhelming impression there was upon him, and though their astonishment deepened into angry and awful gloom beneath the lurid glare of his address, yet they sat spell-bound, listening and gazing at him, and when he descended from the table a profound si- lence reigned in the whole circle, and not one word concerning the wager was uttered. Thorpe in- stantly withdrew from the company without utter- ing a word, and, it is needless to say, never re- turned to that society ; but, after a season of the deepest distress and conflict, passed into the full light of the Gospel, and at length became a most successful preacher of its grace. Two other cases may be named, occurring under the ministry of two of Lady Huntingdon's chap- lains, at Oat Hall ; the first under the preaching of the celebrated Mr. Komaine, and the last under that of Mr. Venn, scarcely less remarkable as a devout experimental preacher. The two cases are from extremes in society, and therefore are with greater propriety presented as illustrations of the all-pervading power of this work of God's grace. And the time of these two striking instances was very near that of Cowper's own spiritual arrest and conversion, from 1762 to 1764. The first was CAPTAIN SCOTT. 53 of a military gentleman of an ancient family, Cap- tain Scott, who had been a soldier from his seven- teenth year, and was one of the officers exposed to imminent peril at the battle of Minden, in 1759. A sense of his danger led him to the daily reading of the psalms and hymns in the Church lessons of each day, but beyond this he advanced not a step to the knowledge of the grace of Christ as the way of salvation. At length, being quartered in the neighborhood of Oat Hall, a pious farmer invited him to go and hear a very famous man in the Hall preaching for Lady Huntingdon. It was Mr. Ko- maine, and thither he went to hear him the fol- lowing Sunday ; and Mr. Komaine's text was as if aimed and meant for the very condition of Scott's awakened but ignorant soul. It was the words of our blessed Lord in John, xiv. 6, " I am the Way." It was accompanied by the Spirit of God, and from that time Captain Scott was a changed man, and speedily began to preach to his own soldiers the truth which he had learned to love. He ex- horted his dragoons daily, and would not be deterred by any of the annoyances and opposition which he had to meet in the army. Fletcher described him to Lady Huntingdon as preaching publicly in his regimentals to numerous congregations at Leicester in the Methodist Meeting-house. " This red-coat," said he, " will shame many a black one. I am sure he shames me." At length he sold his mili- 54 OLD ABRAHAM. tary commission, and entered into the ministry. For twenty years he was one of the preachers at the Tabernacle in London. He renounced a' bril- liant career of honor and advancement in this world for the privilege, which had become dearer to him than all things else, of preaching Christ crucified to dying sinners. The second of these instances was in humbler life, but more remarkable still for the great age of the man converted. It was an old man named Abraham, who for fifty years was a common sol- dier, and getting discharged from the service, set- tled with his wife near Oat Hall. When Lady Huntingdon's chapel was opened at Oat Hall, Abra- ham was just a hundred years old ; but though of that great age, still vigorous, active, and, on the subject of religion, inquisitive, and at the opening of the new chapel he made up his mind to hear the Methodists. That morning Mr. Venn preached, and that was the hour of Abraham's baptism by the Spirit. Never had he heard such truth, never with such perception of it, never so presented. " This/' said he, " is the very truth of God's Word, which I have been seeking, and never heard it so plain before. Here will I abide." From that time forward old Abraham was the child of God, grow- ing in grace and in the knowledge of the Saviour. He lived six years a most consistent and happy life as a Christian disciple ; and his great age and MISREPRESENTATIONS. 55 heavenly conversation made him the object of veneration, wonder, and love. He always called the day when he heard the Gospel from Mr. Venn's lips the day of his birth, and spoke of himself, in allusion to Isaiah, lxv. 20, as the child born a hun- dred years old. We know of only one similar instance on record, the case of the aged convert under the preaching of Flavel, who lived to adorn the profession of his faith to the age of one hun- dred and fifteen years. Extraordinary cases of conversion at this same period when Cowper's saving experience of the truth began, might be multiplied ; his own case was but one of a series, though in some respects the most remarkable. It was a time of spiritual life and power, and every class of society in En- gland felt it, notwithstanding the multitude in every circle who chose to take to themselves that dread malediction upon the enemies of such a work of grace, Behold ye despisers, and wonder, and perish ! It is surprising that Southey could have allowed himself to assume and perpetuate such prejudice and scorn ; that he could ascribe (even by insinuation) the piety of Lady Huntingdon to here- ditary insanity, and deplore the failure of all the ef- forts of established dignitaries in the Church to bring her to a saner sense of devotion ! that he could regard the piety of Bunyan as the fever of a burn- ing enthusiasm, and speak of Cowper's season of 56 CHARACTER OF W H I T E F I E L D . personal and social religious enjoyment as having been preposterously called the happiest period of his life ! One is almost tempted to exclaim, he- holding such a man employed with such a spirit upon the wonders of providence and grace devel- oped in the lives of such men as Bunyan, White- field, Wesley, and Cowper, " What hast thou to do to declare God's statutes, or that thou shouldst take His covenant in thy mouth, seeing thou hatest instruction and castest His words behind thee ? Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother ; thou slanderest thine own mother's son." In contrast with the spirit of detraction and the license of literary scorn, how beautiful and noble was the character of Whitefield, as drawn by Cow- per in one of the earliest published of his poems, the " Essay on Hope." It was twenty years after his own conversion, and twelve years after Whitefield's death, when the poet penned this graphic and in- teresting portraiture. Had Cowper drawn the character of Wesley, it would have stood to all ages in the same Christian light, the truthful, un- exaggerated testimonial of an admiring, grateful heart. Leuconomus — (beneath well-sounding Greek I slur a name a poet must not speak) — Stood pilloried on infamy's high stage, And bore the pelting storm of half an age ; The very butt of slander, and the blot For every dart that malice ever shot. W H I T E F I E L D . 57 The man that mentioned him at once dismissed All mercy from his lips, and sneered and hissed. His crimes were such as Sodom never knew, And perjury stood up to swear all true ; His aim. was mischief, and his zeal pretense ; His speech rebellious against common sense ; A knave, when tried on honesty's plain rule, And when by that of reason, a mere fool ; The world's best comfort was, his doom was past, Die when he might, he must be damned at last. Now, Truth, perform thine office ; waft aside The curtain drawn by prejudice and pride. Reveal (the man is dead) to wondering eyes This more than monster, in bis proper guise. He loved the world that hated him ; the tear That dropped upon his Bible was sincere. Assailed by scandal, and the tongue of strife, His only answer was a blameless life ; And he that forged, and he that threw the dart, Had each a brother's interest in his heart. Paul's love of Christ, and steadiness unbribed, Were copied close in him, and well transcribed. He followed Paul, his zeal a kindred, flame, His apostolic charity the same. Like him crossed cheerfully tempestuous seas, Forsaking country, kindred, friends, and ease. Like him he labored, and like him content To bear it, suffered shame where'er he went. Blush, calumny, and write upon his tomb, If honest eulogy can spare the room, The deep repentance of thy thousand lies "Which, aimed at him, have pierced the offended skies, And say, Blot out my sin, confessed, deplored, Against Thine image in Thy saint, Lord I Perhaps the Word of God was never preached in England with greater unction and power, cer- tainly never with more wonderful results, than by that circle of preachers, among- whom Whitefield, 68 LAD Y II U X TINODO N . Wesley, Romaine, Venn, Berridge, Toplady, New- ton, Scott and Cecil, held so conspicuous a posi- tion. The piety of Lady Huntingdon was a spring of impulse and of influence in this remarkable circle. Never was there a brighter manifestation of divine grace in the female character than in her's. Her family was one of the foremost in the crowd of the British aristocracy, at a period when that aristocracy was in its fullest bloom of power, wealth and grandeur. Cowper's withdrawal from that splendid social circle, of which at one time it was hoped he might have been an ornament, was a bitter mortification to his relatives and friends. They assigned his gloom and madness to religious enthusiasm as its cause, when religion was its only cure. It is not so singular that at that day they should have labored under so dark a delusion — a lunacy ten thousand-fold worse than his at any period of its disastrous power ; but that a biogra- pher and historian, himself professedly a member of the Christian Church, should have insinuated hereditary insanity as the cause of Lady Hunting- don's conversion, and Cowper's conversion as the cause of his insanity, and Newton's faithful and tender instruction, sympathy, and care in the duties of religion, as the occasion of general lunacy among his flock, and that too after more than fifty years' calm judgment of the age, in admiration of the providence and grace of God in the lives and OPPOSITION. 59 religious experience of those personages, is sur- prising indeed. Cowper's pointed and severe de- scription of the spirit that characterized the multi- tude in his age is applicable to not a few in ours. Build by whatever plan caprice decrees, With what materials, on what ground you please ; Your hope shall stand unblamed, perhaps admired, If not that hope the Scripture has required. The strange conceits, vain projects, and wild dreams With which hypocrisy for ever teems, (Though other follies strike the public eye And raise a laugh,) pass unmolested by. But if, unblamable in word and thought, A man arise, a man whom God has taught, With all Elijah's dignity of tone, And all the love of the beloved John, To storm the citadels they build in air, And smite th' untempered wall 'tis death to spare, To sweep away all refuges of lies And place, intead of quirks themselves devise, Lama Sabacthani before their eyes ; To prove that without Christ all gain is loss, All hope despair, that stands not on his cross ; Except the few his God may have impressed, A tenfold frenzy seizes all the rest. Throughout mankind, the Christian kind at least, There dwells a consciousness in every breast That folly ends where genuine hope begins, And he that finds his heaven must lose his sins. Nature opposes, with her utmost force, This riving stroke, this ultimate divorce ; And, while religion seems to be her view, Hates with a deep sincerity the true. For this, of all that ever influenced man Since Abel worshiped, or the world began, This only spares no lust, admits no plea, But makes him, if at all, completely free ; GO OPPOSITION. Sounds forth the signal, as she mounts her car, Of an eternal, universal war ; Rejects all treaty, penetrates all wiles, Scorns with the same indifference frowns and smiles ; Drives through the realms of sin, where riot reels, And grinds his crown beneath her burning wheels ! Hence all that is in man, pride, passion, art, Powers of the mind, and feelings of the heart, Insensible of truth's almighty charms, Starts at her first approach, and sounds to arms ! While bigotry, with well-dissembled fears, His eyes shut fast, his fingers in his ears, Mighty to parry and push by God's "Word, With senseless noise, his argument the sword. Pretends a zeal for godliness and grace, And spits abhorrence in the Christian's face. CHAPTER IV. LITERATURE AND GENU'S OF THE PERIOD.'— PREVALENCE OF SKEPTICISM. The same year, 1762, may be taken as a year of survey, in regard to tlie aspect and influences of times, circumstances, society, and literature, as well as religion. It was about twenty years after the death of Pope, forty-one from the death of Prior, forty-three from that of Addison, thirty- three from that of Steele, seventeen from that of Swift, thirty from that of Gay, thirty-six from that of Vanbrugh, and thirty-nine from that of Con- greve. Arbuthnot died in 1735, Lord Bolingbroke in 1751. Some of these writers had stamped the manners and opinions of the age by their genius, and formed a taste and style then fully prevalent. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, so distinguished for the ease, wit, and beauty of her letters, died in 1762. Lord Shaftesbury had died in 1713, and the collection of his works had been published in 1716 ; and the powerful influence which the min- gled fascination of his style and deistical opinions 62 LITERATURE AND G E NIL'S exerted in various directions may be learned in the autobiographies of two men as contra-distinguished as Dr. Franklin and John Newton, both having been brought, at an early period, under a tempo- rary despotism beneath that nobleman's writings. Atterbury died in 1731, Defoe in the same year. Bishop Berkely died in 1753; Bishop Lowth, 1787; Dr. Samuel Clarke, 1729 ; Bishop Butler, 1752 ; Handel, 1759; Garrick, 1779. Hannah More was bom 1745, and commenced her literary career when Cowper was writing the Olney Hymns. Among the most celebrated divines of the period were Bishop Newton, Farmer, Lardner, Lowman, Lowth, Leland, Chandler, Warburton, Jortin, Hoadly, Wesley, Whitefield, John Newton, Soame Jenyns, Scott, Kennicott, and Cecil. The period we are contemplating was fourteen years after the death of Thomson, and thirty years since the publication of the Poem of the Seasons. It was fourteen years after the death of Watts. It was just after the publication of Young's "Night Thoughts." " Blair's Grave" had been published in 1743, the "Night Thoughts" in 1760. Yet Southey has spoken of " The Grave" as a poem written in imitation of the "Night Thoughts" ; a criticism which indicates the carelessness and haste with which some other portion of his "Life of Cowper" may have been composed. Dr. Johnson had pub- lished his Dictionary in 17;~>4. and his Rasselassoon OF THE PERIOD. 63 after. It was three or four years after the publi- cation of Gray's Odes. It was just after the pub- lication of Goldsmith's " Citizen of the World/' and just before the appearance of his poem of u The Traveler." It was the year before the death of Shenstone. It was eight years after the death of Collins, the poet so nearly at one time resembling Cowper in the dread eclipse of reason under which he died, and in his inimitably exquisite poetry, coming nearer, in every line, to the perfection of Cowper in his most harmonious pieces, than any other poet in the English language. Chatterton, the marvelous boy that perished in his pride, was at this time ten years old, and began his sad, strange, poetical career only one year afterward. Churchill was in the brief bonfire of reputation, and had just published his " Rosciad." The admira- tion of his poems was like the gaze of a crowd at a display of fire-works from the top of the London Monument. Falconer had just published his " Shipwreck," and it was the year of the publica- tion of MTherson's " Fingal." Edmund Burke had published his " Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful," but had not yet en- tered Parliament, nor began that development of his wonderful genius which afterward attracted the gaze of all Europe. Garrick and Foote were in the midst of their fame, and Sir Joshua Reynolds of his. The Johnsonian Club and circle were in 64 LITERATURE AND GENIUS the first zest of their social and literary enjoyment. It was the year after the death of Richardson, the novelist. Smollet, Fielding, Mackenzie, Horace Walpole, Mr. Beckford, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Rad- cliffe, Miss Burney, and some others, had opened, or were striking out, various new paths in that wil- derness of fiction in which the main body of readers in our world have since been wandering, delighted and absorbed ; paths that some of them, if pursued, lead to inevitable ruin. It was three years after the publication of Robertson's " History of Scot- land," and the year of the publication of the two last volumes of Hume's " History of England." Adam Smith's " Theory of Moral Sentiments" had been published in 1759. Sir William Blackstone was in the midst of his eminent reputation and service in the law ; his " Commentaries" were pub- lished in 1765. Reid's " Inquiry into the Human Understanding" was published in 1764 ; Lord Karnes's " Elements of Criticism" in 1762. The first edition of Percy's " Reliques of Ancient En- glish Poetry" was published, 1765. The first vol- ume of Warburton's " Divine Legation" was pub- lished in 1738, the last not till 1788, after the author's death. Matthew Tindal's " Christianity as Old as the Creation" was published not long before the " Divine Legation ;" and that deistical controversy arose out of it in which Dr. Waterland and Dr. Conyers Middleton took an important OF THE PKHIOD. 05 part. Middleton's "Life of Cicero" was first published about 1740, and Leland's " Deistical Writers" near the same period. Neal's " History of the Puritans" was published, the two first volumes in 1733. The fourth edition of War- burton's work was dedicated, in 1765, to Lord Mansfield, then and for many years the Lord Chief Justice of England. Until the publication of the poem of the " Night Thoughts," there had been, for near three quarters of a century, little intrusion of religion into what was called Polite Literature ; but the world had seen the influence of a witty, licentious, and infidel literature passing into what was called religion. They had seen simplicity and nature retire before the tinsel and the blaze of art enshrined by ge- nius, and worshiped with idolatrous devotion. Formalism had taken the place of true piety ; fervor was ridiculed as fanaticism, faith despised as superstition, and superstition exalted into the place of faith. Deism and Socinianism had pre- vailed under the robes of the priesthood of the Church of England, and were encountered, if at all, with cold, elaborate, artificial learning, in the shape of cumbrous Essays, of which the collection of Tracts by Watson in five octavo volumes is a favorable specimen. When Whitefield and Wes- ley began their impetuous and shining career, re- ligion was at a low ebb indeed in the Church and 66 PREVALENCE OF SKEFTICIS M . among tlie people of England. Bishop Butler presented his " Analogy" to the queen in 173G, and in the prefatory advertisement to that profound and powerful work he was constrained to write as follows : " It is come, I know not how, to he taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry ; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And ac- cordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of dis- cernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long in- terrupted the pleasures of the world." And at the close of that great work he said, " If men can go on to vilify or disregard Christianity, which is to talk and act as if they had a demon- stration of its falsehood, there is no reason to think they would alter their behavior to any purpose, though there were a demonstration of its truth." There ivas a practical demonstration, in the out- pouring of the Divine Spirit attending the preach- ing of Whitefield and Wesley, such as had not been witnessed since the days of Pentecost ; but the demonstration itself was maligned and blas- phemed by many, as the casting out of devils by Beelzebub. Cowper says himself, in one of his letters to a dear religious friend in 1767, " My religious prin- PREVALENCE OF SKEPTICISM. 67 ciples are generally excepted against, and the con- duct they produce, wherever they are heartily maintained, is still more the object of disapproba- tion than the principles themselves." In a previ- ous letter to Lady Hesketh, he had said, " Solitude has nothing gloomy in it, if the soul points upward. St. Paul tells his Hebrew converts, '-Ye are come (already come) to Mount Sion, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant/ When this is the case, as surely it was with them, or the Spirit of Truth had never spoken it, there is an end of the melancholy and dullness of life at once. ... A lively faith is able to anticipate in some measure the joys of that heavenly society which the soul shall actually possess hereafter. . . . My dear cousin, one half of the Christian world would call this madness, fanaticism and folly. . . . Let us see that we do not deceive ourselves in a matter of such infinite moment." If one half the Christian world had got so turned away from life into the frost and death of formal- ism, with little or nothing of life left but just enough for the demonstration of bitterness and opposition against what were called the doctrines of grace, and in ridicule of the style of fervent piety called Methodism, how deplorable an influ- ence must have reigned in the world of popular 68 PREVALENCE OF SKEPTICISM. and fashionable literature ! No wonder that a sarcastic and haughty deism, and the frigidity and carelessness of natural religion maintained so great and wide a supremacy. The idea of conver- sion by the grace of God was scoffed at, was re- garded as enthusiasm or fanaticism, assuming, indeed, a mild and melancholy type in an amiable man such as Cowper, but still a self-righteous, presumptuous, conceited form of spiritual bigotry and pride. In such a period, great was the need of instruments to be raised up and prepared like Cowper, Hannah More and Wilberforce, to carry the powerful voice of truth into the drawing-rooms of the great, the gay, and the fashionable, and to set Christianity itself, in its simplest Gospel dress, amid the attractions of science, genius, and lite- rary taste. CHAPTER V. TUS ARREST OF COWPER. — PROVIDENCES AND DISCIPLINE OF TRIAL BY WHICH HE WAS AWAKENED. — HIS ATTEMPT AT SUICIDE. — HIS CONVICTION OF SIN. — HIS ANGUISH AND DESPAIR. The great event of Cowper's conversion made a change in his whole life and social circle, such as no temporary insanity, had he recovered from it in any other way than that of a religious faith by Di- vine grace, could have effected. It broke up all his habits, and removed him forever from the gay and dissipated companions, in whose society so many years of the best part of his life had already been spent. " The storm of sixty- three," as Cow- per designated the period of his terrific gloom and madness at St. Alban's, made a wreck of the friendships of many years, and he said that he had great reason to be thankful that he had lost none of his acquaintances but those whom he had deter- mined not to keep. He refers, in his letters, to some of them who had been suddenly arrested by death, while he himself was passing through the valley of the shadow of death in the lunatic asy- 70 THE ARREST. lum. "Two of my friends have been cut off dur- ing my illness, in the midst of such a life as it is frightful to reflect upon ; and here am I in better health and spirits than I can almost remember to have enjoyed before, after having spent months in the apprehension of instant death. How mysteri- ous are the ways of Providence ! Why did I re- ceive grace and mercy ? Why was I preserved, afflicted for my good, received, as I trust, into fa- vor, and blessed with the greatest happiness I can ever know or hope for in this life, while they were overtaken by the great arrest, unawakened, unre- penting, and every way unprepared for it ? His infinite wisdom, to whose infinite mercy I owe it all, can solve these questions, and none beside Him." One of these friends cut off so unexpect- edly, was poor Kobert Lloyd the poet, son of Eev. Dr. Lloyd, one of the teachers at Westminster School. They had been among Cowper's intimate associates in the Nonsense Club, with Bonnel Thornton, George Colman, and others of a like convivial character. No wonder at the feelings of gratitude and amazement with which he looked back at his own danger, and at the supernatural suddenness and violence of his escape. In 1762 the revolutionary chain of events in Cowpcr's existence began, and his character and life were together arrested and turned back from an earthly into a heavenly career. He had glided FALSE PEACE. 71 on through life thus far, till he was thirty-one years of age, a fine classical scholar, a man of ex- quisite refined taste, an amiable, playful, affection- ate temper, a deep humorous vein, and a disposi- tion for social amusement, as well as a tendency to mental depression, that led him to seek the en- joyment of society for relief. He had neither re- ligious habit nor principle, but had come to an acquiescence, with which he says he had settled down, in the following conclusion as to the future life, namely, " that the only course he could take to secure his present peace was to wink hard against the prospect of future misery, and to resolve to banish all thoughts upon a subject on which he thought to so little purpose." To icink hard against the prospect of future misery ! How graphic a picture of the struggle in a careless, prayerless, pleasure-loving heart, against partial conviction and anxiety in regard to the retributions of a future state. This winking hard against the prospects of future misery is, we apprehend, the only religious effort of many a mind, and the only step of many a disturbed and frightened conscience toward peace. Some persons wink so hard, that the effect is like that produced by a blow upon the temples, or a strong, sudden pressure over the eye-balls, making the eyes flash fire. Strange radiances appear in these eye-flashes, which some are willing to accept as revelations, 72 SPIRITUAL SLEEP-WALKERS. when they have rejected the Word of God, or so utterly neglected it, as to be quite ignorant of its actual details in reference to the future world. If the soul were suddenly illuminated, in the midst of its carelessness and unbelief, to see and feel things as they are, terror would take posses- sion of the conscience and the heart, and all insen- sibility would pass away forever. But we are often as men in a trance, or as persons walking in their sleep, and conscious of nothing. Sleep- walkers are never terrified, even by dangers that would take from a waking man all his self-posses- sion. Sleep-walkers have been known to balance themselves upon the topmost ridge of the most perilous heights, with as much indifference and security as if they were walking upon even ground. They have been seen treading at the eaves of lofty buildings, and bending over, and looking down into the street, making the gazers, who have dis- covered the experiment, tremble with fright, and grow faint with expectation ; and if the trance should suddenly pass away, and the waking sense be restored, the self-discovery would prove fatal, and the man would lose his balance and fall, where before he trod with perfect indifference and security. Just so to the quickened sight and con- science of spiritual spectators, careless sinners are beheld walking asleep and indifferent on the verge of the world of woe. They bend over toward the THE AWAKENING. 73 flaming gulf, and if they saw and felt what it is they are doing, what dreadful hazard they are running, there would, for the time, be no more life in them. The consciousness of meeting a holy God, and the thought of what was before them, would fill their minds with anguish, which nothing but the blood of Christ, nothing but a heartfelt, humble application of the soul for God's mercy, through Christ, nothing but the faith and hope of forgiveness, could possibly allay. Through this process of awakening, and terror, Cowper was to pass to life and peace eternal, though reason itself was to be dethroned, for a short period, in the dreadful conflict. But God's time of interposing mercy had come. Cowper had now nearly spent what little patrimony .had fallen to him, and began to be in want ; under fear of want, he began to desire an appointment. Here occurs a passage in his autobiography which the writers of his life long concealed studiously from notice, and continued to ignore its existence, even when it had been printed, and even garbled it in printing it themselves. Hayley ran over the pass- age by saying that Cowper, in this emergency, had prospects of emolument by the interest of his family, and was nominated to the offices of Read- ing Clerk, and Clerk of the Private Committees in the House of Lords. Now let Cowper, as a grateful child of God, showing us from what 4 74 BEL r -.1 D DOM i; N T. depths of guilt and misery he had been rescued, open the door of his own heart, or a window in it, and tell us what was going on, with his own mature and devout judgment upon the transac- tions ; a judgment severer, certainly, than a man of the world would ever pass upon mere motives, but nevertheless the self-judgment of a mind and heart, looking back from a state of calm and heavenly peace with God, over a life that had been passed without him. Under some imagination or apprehension of ap- proaching want, Cowper says, " I one day said to a friend of mine, if the Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords should die, I had some hopes that my kinsman, who had the place in his dis- posal, would think of and appoint me to succeed him. We both agreed that the business of the place, being transacted in private, would exactly suit me ; and both expressed an earnest ivish for his death, that I might be provided for. Thus did I covet what God had commanded me not to covet, and involved myself in still deeper guilt, by doing it in the spirit of a murderer." It was remarkable that very speedily this Clerk of the Journals of the House died, and two other offices by the same event fell vacant, being in the gift of Major Cowper, the poet's friend and kins- man. These two offices of Beading Clerk, and Clerk of the Committee, being the most profitable FEARS AND PERPLEXITIES. 75 places, were at once offered to Cowper, and he immediately, without a moment's reflection, ac- cepted them ; but at the same time, as it pleased Grod, "received a dagger in his heart," and began to be deeply perplexed by the impossibility of executing a business of so public a nature. After a week spent in misery, he besought his friend to give him the simple Clerkship of the Journals, instead of the higher situation, and, when this exchange was accomplished, he began to be some- what at ease. But a new difficulty arose, for Major Cowper's right to nominate his kinsman being disputed, and a powerful party formed in favor of another can- didate, every inch of ground had to be contested ; there must be an examination at the Bar of the House, and Cowper had to visit the Journal Office daily, in order to qualify himself for the strictest scrutiny. This brought back the whole horror of his fears and perplexities. He knew to a demon- stration that upon these terms the Clerkship of the Journals was no place for him. Nevertheless, his friend's honor and interest, and his own repu- tation and circumstances, made it seem absolutely necessary that he should persevere, and did indeed urge him forward, though only as a fettered criminal is dragged to execution. " They whose spirits are formed like mine," says he in his own journal of these occurrences, " to whom a public 76 FEVER OF THE NERVES. exhibition of themselves on any occasion is mortal poison, may have some idea of the horror of my situation ; others can have none. My continual misery at length brought on a nervous fever ; quiet forsook me by day, and peace by night. A finger raised against me was more than I could stand against/' In this distressing condition he went daily to the Journal Office, and read, in preparation for his examination, like a man beneath the nightmare. All the inferior clerks were under the influence of the opposing candidate, so that from them he could gain no assistance, nor in this condition of mind would it have availed him in the least, for he turned over the leaves as an automaton, with a perfect bewilderment and vacuity, as one under the power of a spell ; and this habit he continued, studying without perception, understanding, or instruction, and, in fact, in absolute, uninterrupted despair, every day for more than half a year. Now here was enough to make almost any man insane, and it is wonderful that Cowper's mind did not sooner give way under this process. It is sur- prising that he could persevere so long in this mode of life, and keep up the appearance of hope and cheerfulness. And yet there is a most playful let- ter on record, written to Lady Hesketh, in the very midst of ail this torture. An absence at Margate, with the intermission of his painful employments, SELF-TORTURE. 77 and a season of social enjoyment in a new scene, helped him to recover his spirits ; but still the ter- rible crisis was before him, and in October he had to return to the office and renew his ineffectual la- bor, pressed by necessity on either side, with noth- ing but despair in prospect. For this was the dilemma to which now his sen- sitive mind was reduced, either to keep possession of the office, and contest it to the last extremity, and by so doing expose himself to a public rejection for incompetency, or else to renounce it at once, and thus run the hazard of ruining his benefactor's right of appointment. The anguish of his perplex- ity was such that sometimes in a fit of passion when alone, he would cry out aloud, and curse the hour of his birth, lifting up his eyes to heaven and exclaiming, " What sin have I committed to de- serve this ?" He could not pray, and would not attempt it, being firmly persuaded that God would not deliver him. But he consulted Dr. Heberden, his physician, and dosed himself with drugs ; and having found a prayer or two in what he called " that repository of self-righteousness and pharisa- ical lumber, < The Whole Duty of Man/ " he re- peated them a few nights, and then threw away the book and all thoughts of God and of a remedy with it. His wretchedness was past hope and effort. And now it could not be otherwise, these things 78 ATTEMPTS AT continuing, than that the coil of his misery, inde- cision, and despair, should rapidly run his mind, down to madness. He had, indeed, a strong fore- boding of it, and began to look upon madness as his only chance remaining. So earnestly did he desire it, that his grand fear now was that the failure of his senses would not come in time to ex- cuse his appearance at the bar, and prevent the trial for the clerkship. But he was still in his senses as the day drew near ; and amid the flashes in the stormy horizon of his soul in that terrible tempest, the dark and dreadful purpose of self- murder began to disclose itself, at first dim, murky, and vanishing, then fixed and intimate, and enter- tained without shuddering. He began to reason that perhaps there might be no God, or the Scrip- tures might be false, and suicide nowhere forbid- den, or that at the worst his misery in hell itself would be more supportable. Probably the state of mind of a self-murderer never before was dis- closed with such dreadful truth and reality, if disclosed at all. At first he resorted to laudanum, and one day in November 1763, purchased a bottle of the poi- son, which he kept by him for a week, but was providentially by one interposition after another, preserved from accomplishing his purpose. At length the very morning before the day appointed for his public appearance at the bar of the house, SELF-DESTRUCTION. 79 he took up a newspaper in Kichards's Coffee House, where he was at breakfast, and read in it a letter which, in his disordered state of mind, seemed to him a libel intended for himself, and written by- one acquainted with his circumstances, on purpose to hurry him on to the suicide he was contemplat- ing. In reality this delusion, itself sufficient proof that already he was insane, had that effect ; and after several ineffectual attempts, he arose the next morning, hearing the clock strike seven, and knowing that no more time was to be lost, bolted the inner door of his chamber, as he thought, and proceeded deliberately to the work of hanging him- self by means of a garter made of a broad piece of scarlet binding with sliding buckles. He strained the noose tightly around his neck, and fastened it to the top of the bed-frame, but the iron bent and let him down. A second time he fastened it, but the frame broke short, and he fell again. A third time he fastened it on an angle of the door, and pushing away the chair with his feet, hung at his whole length, till he lost all consciousness of exist- ence, and knew nothing, till a feeling like that pro- duced by a flash of lightning passed over his whole body, and he found himself fallen on his face upon the floor. The blood had stagnated under his eye, but by the mercy of God the cord broke before the strangulation was completed, and Cowper was saved. 80 CONVICTIONS UK GUILT. And now ensued the most overwhelming convic- tion of guilt, though up to this time he had felt no anxiety of a spiritual kind ; the attempt at self-murder harrowed up his conscience, and a sense of God's wrath, and a deep despair of escap- ing it, instantly succeeded. The terrors of the Lord and his own iniquities set themselves in array against him. Every approach to the Scriptures was but an increase of his anguish, and as in the case of Bunyan, the sword of the Spirit seemed to guard the tree of life from his touch, and flamed against him in even' avenue of access. He was scared with visions and terrified with dreams, and by day and by night experienced a continual agony of soul. In every book that he took up he found something that struck him to the heart, and if he went into the street, he thought the people stared and laughed at him, and it seemed as if the voice of his own conscience was so loud that others must hear it. He bought a ballad of a person who was singing it in the street, because he thought it was written on himself. He now began to imagine that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and in this conviction gave himself up anew to despair. He says that he felt a sense of burning in his heart like that of real fire, and concluded it was an earn- est of those eternal flames which would soon re- ceive him. In this condition he remembered the kindness and piety of his friend the Rev. Martin I N T E R V I E W W.TH KB. MADAN. 81 Madan, and sent for him ; for though he used to think him an enthusiast, yet in this extremity of spiritual distress he felt that if any one could lead and comfort him, it must be he. The good man brought him to the all-atoning blood of Christ, and presented the way of salvation in a manner so simple, scriptural and affecting, that Cowper wept freely with a sense of his ingratitude, and deplored his want of faith. Cowper's brother from Cambridge was with him during that interview with Mr. Madan. Most af- fectionately had Cowper's brother tried to comfort him, but in vain, though pierced to the heart at the sight of such anguish and despair as he found him in. Mr. Madan and Cowper sat on the bed-side together, and he affectionately presented the Gos- pel to the gloomy sufferer, beginning with the lost condition of the sinner against God, as presented in his Word. In this Cowper says he began to feel something like hope dawning in his heart, for since the condition of all mankind was the same, it seemed to make his own state appear less desperate. Then, when presenting the all-atoning efficacy of the blood of Christ and his righteousness for our justification, from the same precious Scriptures, Cowper's heart began to burn within him, and his tears flowed freely. It was only when Mr. Madan came to the necessity, on Cowper's own part, of a personal faith in the Lord Jesus, such as would 8*2 A B S L U T K INSANITY embrace Christ as Paul had done, and say, ' Who loved me, and gave Himself for me/ that Cowper found his heart failing, and deplored his want of such a faith, and could only sigh forth the prayer that God, whose gift it was, might bestow it upon him. It was under the impression from this interview, and in the exercise of this sincere desire for faith, that Cowper seems to have passed from such an in- terval of light into thick darkness, darkness that might be felt. He slept, he says, three hours, but awoke in greater terror and agony than ever. The pains of hell got hold upon him, and the sorrows of death enconrpassed him. The malady manifested its physical power, and showed that it was winding up his nervous system rapidly to delirium. His hands and feet became cold and stiff ; he was in a cold-sweat ; life seemed retreating ; and he thought he was about to die. Notwithstanding the relief his wounded spirit had seemed to receive from its anguish, this paroxysm of nervous depression (extreme depression and extreme ex- citement apparently combined) increased upon him, till, after some hours of horrible and un- speakable anguish and dismay, a strange and dreadful darkness fell suddenly upon him. The sensation, as Cowper described it in his own Me- moir, was as if a heavy blow had suddenly fallen on the brain, without touching the skull ; so in- DEVELOPED. 83 tensely painful, that Cowper clapped his hand to his forehead, and cried aloud. At every blow his thoughts and expressions became more wild and incoherent, till manifestly it was absolute and un- mistakable insanity. From that moment, through the whole interval of madness, all that remained clear to him, he says, was the sense of sin, and the expectation of punishment. His mind was a pro- found chaos, brooded over by despair. His brother instantly perceived this decisive change when it commenced, and, on consultation with his friends, it was determined that he should be carried, not to any retreat in London (for which resolution Cowper afterward praised God, deeming it a particular providence of His mercy), but to St. Albans, and placed under the care of that humane, experienced, and excellent physician, and man of letters and of piety, Dr. Cotton, with whom Cow- per already had some acquaintance. A few days before Cowper left London, his cousin Lady Hesketh, and Sir Thomas, visited him at his chambers in the Temple. It was just before the fearful paroxysm which has been described, and of which the signs were being developed in his deepening gloom. He neither looked at Lady Hesketh nor spoke to her during that interview, and he said in his heart, when she went out of the door, " Farewell ! There will be no more inter- 84 ANGUISH OF course between us, forever !'' In the first letter which he wrote to Lady Hesketh after the restora- tion of his reason, he referred to his unaccountable behavior in that interview. " I remember I neither spoke to you nor looked at you. The solution of the mystery indeed followed soon after ; but at the time it must have been inexplicable. The uproar within was even then begun, and my silence was only the sulkiness of a thunder-storm before it opens. I am glad, however, that the only instance in which I knew not how to value your company, was when I was not in my senses." Cowper's brother, on Ins dying bed, described his feelings at the time of the interview with Cow- per in the period of his mental distress in London. He would have given the universe, when he found him in such anguish and despair, to have admin- istered some comfort to him, and tried even' method of doing it, but found it impossible. He began to consider his sufferings as a judgment upon his brother, and his own inability to relieve them as a judgment upon himself. But when Mr. Madan came in and spoke the precious consolations of the Gospel to Cowper's agitated soul, he succeeded in a moment in calming him. This surprised Cow- per's brother, for Mr. Madan had. in the name of Christ, and the message of his mercy to the chief of sinners, a key to Cowper's heart, which his - CO W PER' S BROTHER. 85 brother had then neither gained nor knew how to use ; but it no longer surprised him when the light had broken upon his mind, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding had filled his heart during his own sickness. CHAPTER VI. COWPER'S CONVERSION. — THE GRACE AND GLORY OF IT. During the period of Cowper's seclusion at St. Albans, the tenderest and most skillful discipline, both for mind and body, was brought to bear upon nim, but for many months to no apparent purpose. It was not that reason was dethroned, as in the first access of his insanity, but an immovable, im- penetrable, awful gloom surrounded him, out of which it seemed as if he never would emerge. All this while, Cowper says, conviction of sin and ex- pectation of instant judgment never left him, from the 7th of December, 1763, till the middle of July following ; and for eight months all that passed might be classed under two heads, conviction of sin and despair of mercy. Over the secrets of the prison-house he draws the vail, if indeed he remem- bered them ; but even when he had so far regained his reason as to enter into conversation with Dr. Cotton, putting on the aspect of smiles and mer- riment, he still carried the sentence of irrecoverable doom in his heart. The gloom continued, till a LIGHT AND G R A C E . 87 visit from his brother in July, 1764, seemed at- tended with a faint breaking of the cloud ; and something like a ray of hope, in the midst of their conversation, shot into his heart. And now, for the first time in a long while, he took up the Bible, which he found upon a bench in the garden where he was walking, but which he had long thrown aside, as having no more any interest or portion in it. The eleventh chapter of John, to which he opened, deeply affected him ; and though as yet the way of salvation was not beheld by him, still the cloud of horror seemed every moment passing away, and every moment came fraught with hope. It seemed at length like a spring-time in his soul, when the voice of the singing of birds might once more be heard, and a resurrection from death be experienced. And, indeed, God's time of mercy in Christ Jesus had now come. Seating himself in a chair near the window, and seeing a Bible there, Cowper once more took it up and opened it for comfort and in- struction. And now the very first verse he fell upon was that most remarkable passage in the third chapter of Romans, that blessed third of Paul, as Bunyan would have called it, " whom God had set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness through the remission of sins that are passed, through the forbearance of God." Immediately on reading 88 LIGHT AND GRACE this verse, the scales fell from his eyes, as in another case from Paul's, and in his own language, "he received strength to believe, and the full beams of the Sun of Kighteousness shone upon him." "I saw," says he, " the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed, and re- ceived the Gospel. Whatever my friend Madan had said to me so long before, revived with all its clearness, with demonstration of the Spirit, and with power." Now this was a most complete and wondrous cure. Not more wondrous was that of the poor wild man of the mountains in Judea, of old pos- sessed with devils, when brought to sit, clothed and in his right mind, at the feet of his Redeemer. The fever of the brain was quenched, those specters with dragon wings that had brooded over the chaos of his soul, were fled forever ; the ignorance and darkness of an understanding blinded by the god of this world had been driven away before the mild, calm, holy light of a regenerated, illum- inated, sanctified reason, in her white robe of humility and faith ; and the anxious, restless, gloomy unbelief and despair of heart had given place to a sweet and rapturous confidence in Jesus. Oh, it were worth going mad many years, to be the subject of such a heavenly deliverance LIGHT AND Q R A C £. 89 The Hand Divine of the Great Physician, gentle and invisible, was in all this ; the vail was taken from Cowper's heart, and the Lord of Life and Glory stood revealed before him ; and when his soul took in the meaning of that grand passage in God's Word, it was a flood of heaven's light over his whole being. It was as sudden and complete an illumination as when the light shineth from one side of heaven to the other ; and it was as permanent, through a long and blissful season of unclouded Christian experience, as when the sun shineth at noon-day, or in that other and more lovely image in the Word of God, as the sun's clear shining after rain. It was creative energy and beauty in the spiritual world, transcending the glory of the scene when God said, " Let there he light" in the material world. But what was this sudden revelation ? Assur- edly Cowper had seen, had heard, had read, this passage before. Undoubtedly Mr. Madan, him- self an enlightened and rejoicing Christian, must have presented it to him, and dwelt upon its meaning. Indeed, it had always been, in the speculation of the tj^)logical, and the experience of the Christian worra, as marked a fixture and feature of truth and proof in Christian doctrine, as the sun is a radiant and reigning luminary in the heavens. And yet, Cowper had never beheld it before ! But now, on the verge of a region of 90 DIVINE ILLUMINATION. darkness that can be felt, through which he had been struggling, he saw it suddenly, transport- ingly, permanently. How can this be accounted for ? What invisible influence or agent was busy in the recesses of Cowper's mind, arranging its scenery, withdrawing its clouds, preparing its powers of vision, and at the same time moving in the recesses of that profound passage, shining be- hind the letter of its phrases, as behind a vast transparency, and pouring through it, like a sud- den creation, the imagery of heaven ? There is but one answer ; and this experience of Cowper's mind and heart is one of the most marked and wondrous instances on record, illustrative of his own exquisitely beautiful hymn, beginning, The Spirit breathes upon the Word, And brings the truth to sight. It is one of the most precious demonstrations ever known of that passage in which the Apostle Paul describes his own similar experience, and that of all who are ever truly converted, " For God, who caused the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to gage the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." It was one of the most marvelous and interesting cases of this Divine Illumination in the whole history of Redemption. Why had not Cowper seen all this before ? DIVINE ILLUMINATION. 91 Because, according to God's own answer, "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." These truths were as clearly truths, and as well known in speculation, before that hour, that moment, of the shining of heaven in his soul, as they ever were afterward. But as yet they had not been revealed by the Spirit. But the instant God thus interposed, then could Cowper exclaim with Paul, "Now we have re- ceived not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." First, the revelation of the things that are given, then the Spirit, that we might know them. And the reason why this Divine Illumination did not take place years before, was just because the vail was on the heart, and it had not turned to the Lord, that the vail might be taken away ; and it pleased the sovereign blessed will and infinite wisdom and love of God to lead the subject of this mighty ex- perience out of darkness into light by a gradual preparatory discipline. And yet, when the light came, it was as new, as surprising, as ecstatic, as the light of day to a man blind from his birth. " Unless the Almighty arm had been under me," says he, "I think I should have died with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and 92 JOY IX THE LORD. my voice choked with transport, I could only look to heaven in silence, overwhelmed with love and wonder. But the work of the Holy Spirit is best described in His own words — it was joy unspeak- able, and full of glory. Thus was my Heavenly Father in Christ Jesus pleased to give me full assurance of faith ; and out of a strong unbeliev- ing heart to raise up a child unto Abraham. How glad should I now have been to have spent every moment in prayer and thanksgiving ! I lost no opportunity of repairing to a throne of grace, but flew to it with an eagerness irresistible, and never to be satisfied. Could I help it ? Could I do otherwise than to love and rejoice in my recon- ciled Father in Christ Jesus ? The Lord had enlarged my heart, and I ran in the ways of His commandments. For many succeeding "weeks tears were ready to flow, if I did but speak of the Gospel, or mention the name of Jesus. To rejoice day and night was my employment ; too happy to sleep much, I thought it was lost time that was spent in slumber. that the ardor of my first love had continued !" It was such a change, so bright, so sudden, so complete, so joyful, that at first his kind, Chris- tian and watchful physician, Dr. Cotton, was alarmed lest it might terminate in frenzy ; but he soon became convinced of the sacred sound- ness and permanent blissfulness of the cure. THE VOICE OF CHRIST. 93 Every morning of the year lie visited his inter- esting and beloved patient ; and ever, in sweet communion, the Gospel was the delightful theme of their conversation. What a history of passing hours within the apartments of an insane hos- pital ! Oh, if this were the theme of communion, and this the instrumentality of healing oftener employed, how many distressed, diseased, and wandering spirits might have been restored that, neglected still, have wandered on till the wreck of reason became confirmed and hopeless ! The voice of Christ is the voice of true Science to every lunatic, Bring him hither to Me. CHAPTER VII. COWPER'S SURVEY OF HIS OWN CASE. — HIS REMOVAL TO HUNT- INGDON. — HIS HAPPY EXPERIENCE THERE. — SCENES OF THE COMPOSITION OF HIS EARLIEST HYMNS. — PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK. " Oh the fever of the brain !" exclaimed Cowper in one of his beautiful letters to Lady Hesketb, after his recovery; " to feel the quenching of that fire is indeed a blessing which I think it impossible to receive without the most consummate grati- tude." "My affliction has taught me a road to happiness which, without it 3 I should never have found." Cowper then refers to the rumor which was put in circulation, and has not ceased in some hands to be passed as current from that day to this, although, like a counterfeit bill long in use, it is now nearly worn out, that his madness was the cause of his religion, instead of religion being the cure of his madness. He says, " It gives me some concern, though at the same time it increases my gratitude, to reflect that a convert made in Bedlam is more likely to be a stumbling-block to others than to advance their faith. But he who can as- i cowper's survey. 95 cribe an amendment of life, and manners and a ref- ormation of the heart itself to madness^ is guilty of an absurdity that in any other case would fasten the imputation of madness upon himself/' Cowper speaks of the belief, or rather the vain imagination entertained by multitudes, that a per- son needed no such change as that of conversion in order to be a Christian. " You think I always be- lieved, and I thought so too ; but you were de- ceived, and so was I. I called myself, indeed, a Christian, but He who knows my heart knoivs that I never did a right thing, nor abstained from a wrong one, because I was so ; but if I did either, it was under the influence of some other motive." This is a most impressive and searching remark ; it goes to the inmost condition of every unchanged heart, the native condition of every heart ; and it shows with what profound and thorough a sweep of analysis Cowper had been taught to survey the elements of his own character. He adds, " It is such seeming Christians, such pretending believ- ers, that do most mischief in the cause of its ene- mies, and furnish the strongest arguments to sup- port their infidelity. Unless profession and conduct go together, the man's life is a lie, and the validity of what he professes is itself called in question. The difference between a Christian and an unbe- liever would be so striking, if the treacherous allies of the Church would go over at once to the other 96 cowper's survey side, that I am satisfied religion would be no loser by the bargain." In the survey of his case, Cowper rejoiced with gratitude in the providential care with which it pleased God to assign his treatment not to any London physician, but to a man so affectionate and experienced as Dr. Cotton. " I was not only treated by him with the greatest tenderness while I was ill, and attended with the utmost diligence, but when my reason was restored to me, and I had so much need of a religious friend to converse with, to whom I could open my mind upon the subject without reserve, I could hardly have found a better person for the purpose. My eagerness and anxiety to settle my opinions on that long-neglected point, made it necessary that while my mind was yet weak and my spirits uncertain I should have some assist- ance. The doctor was as ready to administer relief in this article likewise, and as well gratified to do it as in that which was immediately his province. But how many physicians would have thought this an irregular appetite, and a symptom of remain- ing madness ! But if it were so, my friend was as mad as myself, and it is well for me that he was so. My dear cousin, you know not half the deliv- erances I have received ; my brother is the only one in the family who does. My recovery is, in- deed, a signal one, and my future life must express my thankfulness, for by words I can not do it." OF HIS OWN CASE, 97 The remark concerning C owner's brother is ex- ceedingly interesting and instructive, taken in con- nection with his own remarkable conversion five years later. It was the -sight and knowledge of what Cowper passed through ; those depths of an- guish and despair beneath the burden of his guilt in the valley of the shadow of death, where the kindest and most affectionate of brothers could do nothing for him, and could not even understand the causes of his gloom, or the means and the pro- cess of his recovery and joy ; that began to awaken that brother's own suspicions that in his own case all was not right, and set him upon investigating the subject of religion with an attention he had never before paid to it, though he had been a cler- gyman of the Church of England, with a pastoral charge, for several years. This was not the least remarkable of the chain of providences to which Cowper often reverted with adoring gratitude and love, though it was not known till the thrilling disclosure of his brother's conflicts, doubts, dis- tresses, and, at length, rejoicing faith in his sick and dying hours, how God had been dealing with him and leading him onward. Cowper's brother had been but a weeping and helpless spectator in his trials ; but Cowper himself had been prepared of God to be a ministering angel to the anguished spirit of his brother, when it came his turn to pass through the gloomy experience of condemnation 98 SPIRITUAL JOY. under guilt, and afterward through death itself to life eternal. In many a sense Cowper could write, Blind unbelief is sure to err And scan His work in vain ; God is His own interpreter And He will make it plain. Rarely in the history of God's grace has there been a picture of such complete, unmingled, celes- tial peace and joy in believing, as seems to have filled the soul of Cowper, when it first pleased God to shine into his heart with " the light of the knowl- edge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ " The vail was taken away, and he beheld with a happiness passing all jiower f description, the glory of the Lord, and was changed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord. Oh that this might have lasted to the end ! was his very natural wish concerning that season of ecstatic heavenly enjoyment. And at first thought we are ready to repeat the same wish ; but then comes the reflection that such is not God's discipline with us, nor, consider- ing the way in which a Christian is established and perfected or made useful, by any possibility can be ; and then, again, the remembrance that if it had thus continued the world could never have possessed, from Cowper at least, that sweetest and noblest of Christian poems, " The Task/' It was SPIRITUAL JOY. 99 a larger discipline of trials, and of spiritual sorrow intermingled, that must prepare the mind and heart of Cowper for the work God had for him to do. Other processes, deep, secret, unseen, un- known, were to pass within the soil, rough and painful at the time, and rarely resting, before it could be fitted for the creation of that precious fruit. But if ever a saint on earth knew the whole meaning of that expression, a first love, it was Cowper. There was nothing, ever after, to sur- pass it. The perfect day, even if Cowper had come to it on earth, and had continued to enjoy it, could never on earth have been arrayed in such intense, attractive loveliness, as the beauty, the peacefulness, the sweetness, the purity, and the heavenly colors of that morning without clouds, after a night of such blackness, driving tempest, and distracting madness and despair. It was this heavenly experience to which Cowper looks back with such mournful longings, in the most sacredly beautiful and widely known perhaps of all the hymns in our language : "Where is the blessedness I knew When first I saw the Lord ? Where is that soul-refreshing view Of Jesus and His Word? What peaceful hours I once enjoyed ! How sweet their memory still ! But they have left an aching void The world can never fill. 100 COMMUNIO N WITH GOD. These two verses are a parenthesis of prayer, the full meaning of which, only he who wrote these stanzas, looking back to the blissfulness and glory of his earliest experience, could fully understand. But the yearning desire, for a closer walk with God ! is the breathing of every Christian heart. In this serene and happy frame after his re- covery, Cowper remained twelve months still with Dr. Cotton at St. Albans. Meanwhile he had re- solved, by God's help, never to return to London, and, for this purpose, that no obligation might rest upon him to resume his residence there, he resigned the office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, which he held at a salary of sixty pounds per annum, although this procedure left him with an income so small as to be hardly sufficient for his maintenance. His beloved brother resided at Cambridge, and at Cowper's desire made many unsuccessful attempts to procure for him a suit- able dwelling in the neighborhood of the Univer- sity. Cowper now mentions a day in which, with great earnestness, he poured out his soul to God in prayer, beseeching him, that wherever it should please God in His Fatherly mercy to lead him, it might be into the society of those who feared His name, and loved the Lord Jesus in sincerity and truth. What followed he regarded as a proof of God's gracious acceptance of that prayer, having received immediate information of lodgings taken I COMMUNION WITH GOD. 101 for him at Huntingdon, about sixteen miles from Cambridge, where God, lie says, like an indulgent Father, had ordered every thing for him, and had prepared for him a more comfortable place of residence than he could have chosen for himself. Thus, after more than eighteen months spent at St. Albans, he set out for Cambridge and Hun- tingdon, taking with him an affectionate servant, who had watched over him during his whole ill- ness, and who earnestly begged to be permitted still to be with him. He passed the whole time of the way in silent communion with God ; and those hours, he says, were among the happiest he had ever known. " It is impossible to tell," is the strong language of Cowper, " with how delightful a sense of His protection and fatherly care of me it pleased the Almighty to favor me during the whole of my journey." In this happy frame of mind he took possession of his lodgings at Hun- tingdon, whither his brother accompanied him from Cambridge on Saturday, and then bade him farewell. And now, like a little child left alone for the first time among strangers, his heart began to sink within him, and he wandered forth into the fields melancholy and desponding at the close of the day, but, like Isaac at eventide, found his heart so powerfully drawn to God that, having encountered a secluded spot beneath a bank of 102 COMMUNION WITH GOD. shrubbery and verdure, lie kneeled down and poured out his whole soul in prayer and praise. It pleased the Saviour to hear him, and to grant him at once a renewed sense of His presence, a de- liverance from his fears, and a sweet submissive assurance that wherever his lot might be cast, the God of all consolation would still be with him. The next clay was the Sabbath, and he attended church the first time since his recovery, and of course the first time for nearly two years, and he found the House of God to be the very gate to Heaven. He could scarcely restrain his emotions during the service, so fully did he see the beauty of the glory of the Lord. A person with whom he afterward became acquainted sat near him, devoutly engaged in the exercises of Divine Wor- ship, and Cowper beholding him, loved him- for the earnestness of his manner. " While he was singing the Psalms," Cowper says, " I looked at him, and observing him intent upon his holy em- ployment, I could not help saying in my heart with much emotion, The Lord bless you for prais- ing Him whom my soul loveth." Oh, this was the very spirit and temper of the saints and angels in glory ; and, indeed, such was the goodness of the Lord to Cowjier, that though his own voice was stopped in silence by the very intensity of his feeling, yet his soul sang within him, and leaped for joy. By the good pro- COMMUNION WITH GOD. 103 vidence of God, the reading of the Gospel for the day happened to be the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and Cowper felt the whole scene realized with himself, and acted over in his own heart ; and the joy and power of the Word of God, with that heart thus quickened by the Holy Spirit to receive it, were more than he could well support. He hastened immediately after church to that solitary place in the fields where he had found such sacred enjoyment in prayer the day before, and now he found that even that was but the earnest of a richer blessing. "How," exclaims Cowper, "shall I express what the Lord did for me, except by saying that He made all his good- ness to pass before me. I seemed to speak to Him face to face, as a man converseth with his friend, except that my speech was only in tears of joy and groanings which can not be uttered. I could say indeed with Jacob, not how dreadful, but how lovely is this place ! this is none other than the house of God \" There, in this sacred spot, and in the deep de- light of such devout and blissful experience, is the very locality and atmosphere of that perfectly beautiful hymn which Cowper wrote, entitled " Retirement." There was the calm retreat ; there the unwitnessed praise ; there the peace, and joy, and love ; there the holy discipline of communion with the Saviour, by which He prepared His serv- 104 RETIREMENT. ant to pour forth the gratitude of a redeemed spirit in strains which would be sung by the Church of God on earth till the whole Church sing in heaven. If all of Cowper's sufFe rings and joy had yielded but the fruit of that one hymn, it had been cheaply purchased. God ordained him those suf- ferings, and gave him those seasons of mercy, that he might write it. But that was not the only fruit, though perhaps the most perfect, of such heavenly experience ; and God was now preparing not only the inward frame, but the external circumstances of His chosen child, for that unexampled, exquisite, and important work of Christian Poetry which He had for him to accomplish. CHAPTER VIII. FIRST ACQUAINTANCE AND DOMESTICATION WITH THE UNWIN FAM- ILY. — REMOVAL TO OLNEY, AND INTIMATE FRIENDSHIP WITH NEWTON. — COWPER'S ACTIVE AND BENEVOLENT RELIGIOUS HAB- ITS. — COMPOSITION OF THE OLNEY HYMNS. For some months after he had taken lodgings in Huntingdon, he was very closely retired from so- ciety, having little more than the visits of his be- loved brother from Cambridge, who, as it afterward appeared, was himself, even then, blindly groping for the way of life, though not willing to acknowl- edge it. With him, as often as Cowper saw him, which was once or twice a week, he conversed on the leading themes of the Gospel, though for five years the arguments and experience of Cowper seemed to have little effect upon him. Except these visits, and those of one or two acquaintances, whom Cowper playfully described in his letter to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, as odd, scrambling fel- lows like himself, he had little intercourse with the neighbors, but increasing communion with his God in Christ Jesus. With Him his solitude was sweet, and the "wilderness blossomed as the rose." 10b* INTRODUCTION TO u I am much happier," said he, in a letter to Major Cowper, " than the day is long, and sunshine and candlelight alike see me perfectly contented." But God had still a sweeter change for him, and under the sanction and the power of prayer, by the direct guiding providence of God he was un- expectedly brought into an intimate friendship, which fixed the whole course and habitation of his future life. There had been settled for many years in Huntingdon an interesting and delightful Chris- tian family, consisting of the Rev. Mr. Unwin, a worthy divine, somewhat advanced in years, his wife, an accomplished, intelligent, and admirable woman, and their two children, a son and daughter. William Cawthorae Unwin, the son, was at this time about twenty-one years of age, and a student at Cambridge, looking forward to the ministry. Being irresistibly attracted, while in Huntingdon, by Cowper' s appearance at church and in his soli- tary walks, he at length gained his acquaintance ; and to his inexpressible joy, Cowper found in him a sharer in his own most intimate feelings of de- votion, and one whom the Lord had been training from his infancy to the service of the temple. After their very first interview and interchange of hearts, Cowper prayed God, who had been the au- thor, to be the guardian of their friendship, and to give it fervency and perpetuity even unto death. An introduction to the familv immediately fol- X HE UN W i N FAMILY. 107 lowed, and this was the beginning of that precious and invaluable Christian friendship with Mrs. Un- win, which was to last through life, connecting the two in an existence of endearment so affectionate, so singularly intimate, yet so pure, so disinterested, so heavenly, that nothing can be found in mortal story to compare with it. At the outset Cowper thanked God for those Christian friends as his choicest external blessing, though as yet he had no thought of any thing fur- ther than a friendly intercourse with the family as a neighbor. But after four months had passed in his solitary lodgings, he one day found his mind beclouded with darkness, and that intimate com- munion he had so long been enabled to maintain with God was suddenly interrupted. Almost as suddenly it occurred to him, and in a manner which made him ascribe it to the divine suggesting provi- dence of the same gracious Lord who had brought him to Huntingdon, that he might possibly find a place in Mr. Unwin's family as a boarder. A young gentleman who had been residing there as a pupil, had gone the day before to Cambridge, and Cow- per thought it possible he might be permitted to succeed him. It shows in how sensitive and pre- cariously delicate a state his mind then was, and how much he needed the soothing care and tender- ness of confiding Christian friends, that from the moment this thought struck him. lie was in such a 108 B EMOV1L T u OLNKT. turuult uf anxious solicitHde that for some days he could not direct his mind to any other subject. At length, after much prayer and no little conflict and distress in the fear and sense of unsubmissiveness to God's will, in case the blessing should not bo granted, his heart was calmed, the negotiation was entered into with the Unwins, and he became the happiest inmate of their domestic circle. Nearly two years ran on uninterrupted, in sweet social and Christian enjoyment and growth in grace, when Mr. Unwin, the head of the family, was thrown from his horse, and most suddenly and unexpectedly hurried into eternity. This over- whelming affliction was followed by a change in the abode of the whole family from Huntingdon to Olney, the dwelling-place and scene of the pastoral labors of one of the most eminent men of God then living, John Newton ; a man fitted to com- mune with, and guide, and bless the mind and heart of Cowper, in his progress on the way to heaven, even through the valley of the shadow of death. By the same divine providence that had so remarkably led them both thus far, the steps of Newton, at that time a stranger to Cowper, were directed to his abode a few days after the calami- tous event of Mr. Unwin's death. The proposal was then suggested for the removal of the residence of the family to Olney ; and the thing having been resolved upon, Newton engaged for them a house FRIENDSHIP W I T ii N B W T OX. 1 09 near his own dwelling, to which they removed the 14th of October, 1767. There Cowper spent near twenty years of mingled sorrow and joy ; there first his poetical powers were fully developed ; there he passed through unfathomed abysses of darkness and despair ; and there, under the discipline of God's hand, and the guidance of God's grace, the most precious and perfect fruit of his genius bloomed and was ripened. Of the providences by which the intimate friend- ship between Cowper and New r ton was established, the latter beautifully spoke in his preface to the first published volume of Cowper's poetry, declar- ing at the same time his own estimate of the value of that friendship. " By these steps," says New- ton, " the good hand of God, unknown to me, was providing for me one of the principal blessings of my life ; a friend and a counselor, in whose com- pany for almost seven years, though we were seldom seven successive hours separated, I always found new pleasure ; a friend who was not only a com- fort to myself, but a blessing to the affectionate poor people among whom I then lived/' At a still later period of their friendship, indeed, after the death of Cowper, and in a memoir of the poet which Newton began to write, but never finished, he speaks of him as follows : " For nearly twelve years we were seldom separated for twelve hours at a time, when we were awake and at home : the 110 HABITS AT OLXEY. first six I passed in daily admiring and attempting to imitate him ; during the second six, I walked pensively with him in the valley of the shadow of death." Again he gives us a vivid and bright glimpse of Cowper's habits of life during those six delightful years especially, while almost without a cloud, he walked in the light of his Redeemer's countenance. " He loved the poor. He often vis- ited them in their cottages, conversed with them in the most condescending manner, sympathized with them, counseled and comforted them in their dis- tresses ; and those who were seriously disposed were often cheered and animated by his prayers." It is with a singular feeling, combining a mix- ture of astonishment, admiration, anxiety, doubt, and most affectionate religious interest, that the mind presents to itself a picture of the poet Cow- per engaging in those social religious duties. Re- membering the period of madness he had passed through, and the sensitive shyness of his nature, the instinctive and habitual abhorrence with which he shrank from any thing approximating to any public exposure of himself or his feelings, we trem- ble for him as in imagination we see him in the social prayer-meeting and at the bedside of the sick, engaging in exercises which afterward, for the greater period of his life, from the recurrence of his malady, no power on earth could have pre- vailed with him to undertake. And the fact that HABITS AT L N E Y . Ill it was then and for so long a time the choice of his heart and the happiness of his life to engage in those duties, shows as convincingly as his own de- scription of the early blessedness he knew in com- munion with his Saviour, how commanding, ab- sorbing, triumphant and complete the work of Divine grace had been with him. It could trans- figure even such a timid, shrinking, trembling na- ture, just emerged from the terrific and tremendous gloom of absolute insanity into a fearless and sym- pathizing angel of mercy. The errands of such an angel might have been deemed too arduous for a mind so finely toned, so easily thrown from its balance, and disposed to a mental disorder so terrible and unfathomable. But not the least evil result ever seems to have followed from these habits, these efforts ; though at first it could not but have been a painful task to Cowper to step forth from the depths of his retirement on any social mission whatever. But Mr. Newton was with him, and their prayers and Christian confidence, communion and enjoyment, were as the exercises of one mind ; and beyond question the discipline proved a most strengthen- ing and beneficial one both to his intellect and heart. At any rate it was his Saviour's dealing with him ; it was the same Divine wisdom that led the same heavenly Physician to appoint the restored madman from his wanderings anions: the 112 CUWPER'S HYMNS. tombs in Judea to an instant and difficult mission among the wild and wicked sinners of Decapolis. But Cowper's was a gentle, mild, and quiet walk of mercy among the sorrowing and the poor. Be- yond a doubt the discipline of such kindly minis- trations had a blessed ministering quality upon himself, as well as the discipline of his own sor- rows, in enriching and baptizing his poetical ge- nius, and preparing him with a wider and more varied experience for the composition of " The Task." The happy years of his life at Huntingdon and Olney, between 1765, the period of his recovery from the awful gloom and despair of his first mad- ness, and 1773, the period of the first recurrence of that dread mysterious malady, were the time of the composition of the " Olney Hymns/' And if Cowper had never given to the Church on earth but a single score of those exquisite breathings of a pious heart and creations of his own genius, it had been a bequest worth a life of suffering to ac- complish. The dates, or nearly such, of some of those pieces were preserved, so that we are enabled to trace them to the frames and circumstances of the writer's mind and heart, and to see in them an exact reflection of his own experience. The very first that he composed after his recovery at St. Alban's, is said to have been the beautiful hymn entitled the " Happy Change/' of which the two cowter's hymns. 113 following stanzas are sweetly descriptive of his own restoration : How blest Thy creature is, God, When, with a single eye, He views the lustre of Thy word, The day-spring from on high! The soul, a dreary province once Of Satan's dark domain, Feels a new empire formed within, And owns a heavenly reign. But the second strain, in which he poured forth an experience of joy unspeakable and full of glory, — " Far from the world, Lord, I flee" — is sweeter still ; indeed, beyond comparison more perfect : it is exquisitely, sacredly, devoutly beautiful. The last of those compositions is said to have been the hymn beginning, "God moves in a mysterious way;" and there is a sublimity of interest attached to it, besides the native grandeur and beauty of the piece, because we are assured that it was sug- gested and framed under a presentiment of his recurring darkness and insanity of mind. He had been meditating, and doubtless praying, in one of his accustomed solitary walks in the open fields, when that foreboding impression fell upon him ; but before it deepened into the black unfathom- able gloom that his soul apprehended, he composed that most touching expression of his confidence in God and resignation to the Divine will. It was 114 OLNEY HYMNS. ' beneath the distant thunder of that impending tempest, and by its gloomy lightning, that he wrote the words, He plants His footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm. And even in that forboding ominous state of mind, which was followed indeed by the darkness of an almost total eclipse for three years, and a suspen- sion of his powers and a lurid gloom for near four years longer, he closed the hymn with that confid- ing prediction, God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain. Could ever mortal under more sublime and affect- ing circumstances, utter the words, " My times are in Thy hands \" That hymn was entitled " Light shining out of darkness/' Never could Cowper have composed it at such a period, had he not pre- viously been instructed, subdued, and disciplined, and taught the exercise of a lasting and submis- sive faith through all changes, by an experience of the deepest sorrow and the sweetest joy. It was an experience which we find recorded in such hymns as that entitled "Afflictions sanctified by the Word," closing with that sweet stanza, I love Thee, therefore, my God, And breathe toward Thy dear abode ; "Where, in Thy presence fully blest. Thy chosen saints forever rest ; OLNEY HYMNS. 115 and in that entitled, "Looking upward in a storm," and beginning, God of my life, to Thee I call ; Afflicted at Thy feet I fall; When the great water-floods prevail Leave not my trembling heart to fail;' and in that entitled " Peace after a storm," con- taining the stanza, let me then at length be taught "What I am still so slow to learn, That God is love, and changes not, Nor knows the shadow of a turn ; and in that entitled " Temptation," and beginning, " The billows swell, the winds are high," and end- ing with the stanza, Though tempest-tossed, and half a wreck, My Saviour through the floods I seek, Let neither wind nor stormy main Force back my shattered bark again. Out of the same experience grew the hymn on " Submission :" Lord, my best desire fulfilL And there is one of painful interest, entitled " The valley of the shadow of death," expressive of the sadness -and dismay of the soul beneath the smoke and fiery arrows that reach their mark in the throb- bing heart, and fill it with inexpressible anguish. There are others that describe with equal power, 116 OLXEY HYMN 9. and a serene and melodious harmony of joy, the peace and happiness of the soul in believing, and the sudden and surprising light that rises out of gloom upon the Christian, as a season of clear shin- ing after rain. The whole collection, both of New- ton's and of Cowper's hymns, is admirable ; but the tracing of the path of Cowper's genius and piety by what may be called the trail of his sufferings, is one of the most interesting and endearing invest- igations in all the records of biography. Some of these hymns should be read in imme- diate connection with Cowper's own description of his religious experience ; such as those entitled " Praise for faith ;" the " Heart healed and changed by mercy;" the hymn on " Ketirenient;" the " Happy change." Indeed, they all grew out of experience. The theology in these hymns, the sense they ex- press of dependence on God, the way in which Divine Grace reveals the Saviour, the knowledge of the heart, and its heavenly healing, the native blindness, and the new created light, and the power of spiritual vision, the divine discipline, both of providence and grace, the various moods and dangers of the Christian conflict, the yearn- ings of the heart after God and heaven, and the fervent love of Christ, and affectionate confiding faith in his blood ; all are taught by the Divine Spirit ; nothing is at second hand. We have the graphic picture of Cowper's own Christian life, the OLNEY HYMN*. 117 life of faith, and its conflicts too, which are parts so essential of its life ; we have its formation, its happiness, and its trials. Some of Cowper's hymns are very much like Newton's ; as, for» example, the familiar but graphic and most truthful description he has given, in such brief compass, of the sinner's legal blindness and gra- cious deliverance. We quote it, because it is really a rapid sketch of his own case, his own history : Sin enslaved me many years, And led me bound and blind, Till at length a thousand fears Came swarming o'er my mind. Where, said I in deep distress, Will these sinful pleasures end ? How shall I secure my peace, And make the Lord my friend ? Friends and ministers said much The Gospel to enforce ; But my blindness still was such, I chose a legal course ; Much I fasted, watched and strove, Scarce would show my face abroad, Feared almost to speak or move, A stranger still to God. Thus, afraid to trust His grace, Long time did I rebel Till, despairing of my case, Down at His feet I fell. Then my stubborn heart He broke, And subdued me to His sway ; By a single word He spoke, Thy sins are done away. 118 OLNEY HYMNS. How beautiful, as an experimental hymn, drawn in like manner from his own history, is the one en- titled " My soul thirsteth for God ;" also the one en- titled " Dependence ;" also "The new convert;" and " The welcome cross ;" and " The exhortation to prayer ;" and " Jesus hastening to suffer ;" and " The waiting soul," and that affecting hymn en- titled " Looking upward in a storm," so similar to the equally graphic hymn on " Temptation." Let us select this as an example of the tone of sadness and depression that prevails in some of these out- pourings of Cowper's heart, and contrast the criti- cism of Southey that it was dangerous to the Poet, considering the mental malady under which he had suffered, to he engaged in writing on such subjects ! Southey seemed to regard every expres- sion of grief on account of sin and of anguish urrder its burden, every lamentation of insensibil- ity, and every tone of mourning on account of pre vailing unbelief and darkness, as an indication that Cowper was again upon the verge of madness. He could not or would not understand either the joy or the grief of Cowper's Christian experience ; a vapid and desolate experience indeed it would have been if destitute of both ; yet to this frigid condition must it have been reduced, in order to escape the charge of a feverish enthusiasm. The heart that has learned neither understanding nor sympathy in the Christian conflict can have known OLNEY HYMNS. 119 little of Christianity itself, little or nothing of a true Christian experience. What sweeter internal evidence of the genuineness and depth of Cowper's piety can we conceive than the pathetic pleadings of his soul poured forth in stanzas like the fol- lowing : God of my life, to Thee I call, Afflicted at Thy feet I fall ; When the great water-floods prevail, Leave not my trembling heart to fail 1 Friend of the friendless and the faint ! Where should I lodge my deep complaint ? • Where, but with Thee, whose open door Invites the helpless and the poor. Did ever mourner plead with Thee And Thou refuse that mourner's plea ? Does not the Word still fixed remain That none shall seek Thy face in vain ? That were a grief I could not bear, Didst Thou not hear and answer prayer ; But a prayer-hearing answering God Supports me under every load. Fair is the lot that 's cast for me ; I have an advocate with Thee ; They whom the world caresses most Have no such privilege to boast. Poor though I am, despised, forgot, Yet God, my God, forgets me not ; And He is safe, and must succeed, For whom the Lord vouchsafes to plead. The unhappy, ill-natured, almost malignant tone sometimes assumed by Southey in his criti- 120 OLNEY II Y M N S eisms on Cowper's malady, and in his remarks on the tender religious sympathy and care of his friends, reminds us of Saul under the gloom of an evil spirit, casting javelins at Jonathan and David. The perversity of prejudice, almost making a fool of the critic, even in the very sphere in which he prided himself on his superior discrimination, has rarely ever been displayed so grossly as in the fol- lowing paragraph in regard to the Olney Hymns, and Xewton's influence over Cowper : — " Mr. Thornton took a thousand copies for distribu- tion ; but Cowper's influence would never have been extended beyond the sphere in which those hymns circulated, and would have been little there, if he himself had continued under the in- fluence of Mr. Newton. Mr. Newton would not have thought of encouraging him to exercise his genius in any thing but devotional poetry ; and he found it impossible to engage liim again in that, because of the unhappy form which his hallucination had assumed." If Cowper had never written a single line be- yond the four or rive hymns in the Olney Collec- tion, beginning " The Spirit breathes upon the Word," " Far from the world, Lord, I flee," " for a closer walk with God," " God moves in a mysterious way," and :; There is a foun- tain filled with blood," the gift of those four or live hymns to the Church of God by Cowper's ULNEY HYMNS. 121 sanctified genius, through Newton's instrumental- ity, would have been a greater and more precious gift for literature and religion, perhaps, than all his biographer's voluminous writings put together. Be this as it may, there is no apology that can be given for the distorting and discoloring bitter- ness with which the attempt has sometimes been made to caricature such piety as was manifested in the experience and life of Christians like Wes- ley, Whitefield, Lady Huntingdon, Newton, and Cowper. 6 CHAPTER IX. MYSTERY AND MEANING OF THE DIVINE DISCIPLINE WITH COW- PER. — HIS ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF. — INSTRUCTIVE INTEREST OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY. No name in the annals of literature inspires a deeper personal interest than that of Cowper. A mystery still hangs around the malady that shrouded his mind in gloom, deepened at intervals into madness. It was a mystery quite impene- trable before the publication of his own memoir of his remarkable conversion ; a memoir that brings us to a point where the rest of his life and his per- sonal experiences are clearly traced by his own letters. These form the most interesting collection to be found in any literature in the world. Not only the origin and progress of his various literary designs, and of the productions of his genius, but the different phases of his mental disorder, are to be traced step by step. It is the investigation of that derangement, so peculiar, so continued, so profound, that forms the province of deepest inter- est in the study of his biography ; an investigation THE STRICKEN DEER. 128 disclosing scenes of the divine providence in man's discipline, most solemn and instructive. In one of his letters to his friend Unwin, Cowper quoted a Latin adage that he remembered, which he said would have made a good motto for his poem of " Ketirernent." Bene vixit qui bene latuit — he has lived well who has been wisely hidden. It might be applied to Cowper' s whole life, withdrawn by Divine Providence from the busy world, but es- pecially to that part of it so sweetly hid with Christ in God, when Cowper first fled from the world and abode beneath the shadow of the Almighty. God withdrew him from society to prejmre him for the work he had appointed for him to accomplish. In the third book of the " Task," entitled the Garden, there occurs that exquisitely beautiful and affecting passage, which Cowper himself has noted in the argument to the book, with the words, Some account of myself. It has been a thousand times read, a thousand times quoted, yet the thousandth time with not less interest than before : I was a stricken deer, that left the herd Long since ; with many an arrow deep infixed My panting side was charged, when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. There was I found by one who had Himself Been hurt by the archers. In His side he bore, And in His hands and feet, the cruel scars. With gentle force soliciting the darts, He drew them forth, and healed, and bade me live. Since then, with few associates, in remote 124 THE DREAM OF LIFE. And silent woods I wander, far from those My former partners of the peopled scene: "With few associates, and not wishing more. Here much I ruminate, as much I may, With other views of men and manners now Than once, and others of a life to come. I see that all are wanderers ; gone astray, Each in his own delusions ; they are lost In chase of fancied happiness, still wooed, And never won. Dream after dream ensues ; And still they dream that they shall still succeed, And still are disappointed. Rings the world "With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind And add two thirds of the remaining half. And find the total of their hopes and fears Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay As if created only like the fly, That spreads his motely wings in the eye of noon, To sport their season, and be seen no more. The rest are sober dreamers, grave and wise, And pregnant with discoveries new and rare. f freedom in a horse, He breaks the curb that held him at the rack And, conscious of an unincumbered back. Snuffs up the morning air, forgets the rein ; Loose fly his forelock and his ample mane ; Responsive to the distant neigh, he neighs, Nor stops, till overleaping all delays He finds the pasture where his fellows graze. Canst thou, and honored with a Christian name, Bay what is woman-born, and feel no shame ? EXPEDIENCY. 187 Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead Expedience as a warrant for the deed ? So may the wolf, whom famine has made bold, To quit the forest and invade the fold. So may the ruffian, who with ghostly glide, Dagger in hand, steals close to your bedside ; Not he, but his emergence forced the door, He found it inconvenient to be poor. A Briton knows, or, if he knows it not, The Scripture placed within his reach, he ought, That souls have no discriminating hue, Alike important in their Maker's view ; That none are free from blemish since the fall And love Divine has paid one price for alL The wretch that works and weeps without relief Has oxe that notices his silent grief. He from whose hand alone all power proceeds, Ranks its abuse among the foulest deeds, Considers all injustice with a frown, But marks the man that treads his fellow down. Remember, Heaven has an avenging rod ; To smite the poor is treason against God. CHAPTER XVI LADY AUSTEN. — JOHN GILPIN. — MADAME GUION. — THE COLUBRLAD. — COWPER'S EXQUISITE HUMOR. A short time before the publication of this vol- ume, the same Divine providence that had prepared for Cowper such a resting-place and home in the family of the Unwin's, brought to their acquaint- ance a new friend, whose lively wit, and influence over the mind of the poet, were to prove the occa- sion of the greatest production of his genius. This was Lady Austen, the widow of Sir Robert Austen, and sister of the wife of one of Cowper's neighbors, a clergyman at Clifton, about a mile from Olney. The conversational powers of this lady were great, and Cowper was pleased and delighted, for a sea- son, with her acquaintance and friendship. He described her to his friend, Mr. Unwin, as " a wo- man of fine taste and discernment, with mam- features of character to admire, but one in particu- lar, on account of the rarity of it, to engage your attention and esteem. • She has a degree of grati- tude in her composition, so quick a sense of obli- LADY AUSTEN. 189 gation, as is hardly to b£ found in any rank of life, and, if report say true, is scarce indeed in the superior. Discover but a wish to please her, and she never forgets it ; not only thanks you, but the tears will start into her eyes at the recollection of the smallest service. With these fine feelings, she has the most harmless vivacity you can imagine." Lady Austen, for about two years, occupied as her residence the parsonage which Newton had vacated, the garden of which adjoined that of Cowper, with a door opened, by Newton, between them. During those two years the two families were on terms of intercourse so uninterrupted and intimate, that they almost made one household, and for a season were accustomed to dine alternately in each other's house. " Lady Austen and we," said Cowper in one of his letters to Mr. Unwin, " pass our days al- ternately at each other's chateau. In the morning T walk with one or other of the ladies, and in the afternoon wind thread. Thus did Hercules, and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I ; and were both these heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a trial of skill in that business, or doubt to beat them both. As to killing lions, and other amusements of that kind, with which they were so delighted, I should be their humble servant, and beg to be excused." How animating and happy was the influence ex- erted by Lady Austen, and this agreeable change 190 SILVER END and excitement in their ^manner of life at Olney, upon the mind and spirits of Cowper may be judged from that exquisitely beautiful poem addressed to her in a letter during her absence for the first win- ter, in London. It has a meaning, judged by the result, even deeper than any anticipation in the mind of the writer ; for indeed by that friendship Divine providence was arranging the causes and occasions of the most precious and inestimable ef- fort of Cowper's genius. In this little epistle itself are some of the finest lines Cowper ever wrote. Mysterious are His ways, whose power Brings forth that unexpected hour When minds that never met before Shall meet, unite, and part no more. It is the allotment of the skies, The hand of the Supremely Wise, That guides and governs our affections, And plans and orders our connections ; Directs us in our distant road, And marks the bounds of our abode. Thus we were settled when you found us, Peasants and children all around us, Not dreaming of so dear a friend, Deep in the abyss of Silver End. # * * * This page of Providence quite new, And now just opening to our view, Employs our present thoughts and pains To guess and spell what it contains ; But day by day, and year by year, Will make the dark enigma clear, And furnish us perhaps at last, Like other scenes already past, With proof that we and our affairs LADY AUTEN. 191 Are part of a Jehovah's cares ; For God unfolds, by slow degrees, The purport of His deep decrees, Sheds every hour a clearer light In aid of our defective sight, And spreads at length before the soul A beautiful and perfect whole, Which busy man's inventive brain Toils to anticipate in vain. Say, Anna, had you never known The beauties of a rose full blown, Could you, though luminous your eye, By looking on the bud, descry, Or guess, with a prophetic power, The future splendor of the flower ? Just so the Omnipotent, who turns The system of a world's concerns, From mere minutiae can educe Events of most important use, And bid a dawning sky display The blaze of a meridian day. The works of man tend one and all, As needs they must, from great to small, And vanity absorbs at length The monuments of human strength. But who can tell how vast the plan Which this day's incident began ? Too small, perhaps, the slight occasion For our dim-sighted observation, It passed unnoticed, as the bird That cleaves the yielding air unheard, And yet may prove, when understood, A harbinger of endless good. The friendship of Lady Austen was a cordial in- fluence provided for him at a period when the cloud of dejection upon his mind seemed to be gathering unusual blackness. His interesting and absorbing occupation with his first poetical volume was ended 192 ANIMATING INFLUENCE by its publication, and as yet nothing had come to supply its place. Some of the criticisms upon that volume had a depressing effect upon his spirits for a season, and would even have led him, he some- where intimates, to renounce poetry altogether, had it not been for the friendly and encouraging admiration of his volume expressed by Dr. Frank- lin. Cowper told his friend Unwin that he felt, on after consideration, " rather ashamed of having been at all dejected by the censure of the critical reviewers, who certainly could not read without prejudice a book replete with opinions and doctrines to which they could not subscribe." Southey re- marked, in regard to the same unfavorable review, that " without prejudice on the score of opinions, and without individual ill-will, or the envious dis- position which not unfrequently produces the same effect, a dull critic or a pert one is generally ready enough to condemn what he wants heart to feel, or understanding to appreciate. This reviewal of Cowper's first volume is one of those defunct criti- cisms which deserves to be disinterred and gibbeted for the sake of example." Among the expedients devised by Lady Austen to please and animate the mind of Cowper, when the alarming tendency to deep dejection was again becoming manifest, and occupation and amuse- ment were requisite, was the happy gift of a small portable printing-press, on which he could strike JOHN GILPIN. 193 off his own compositions. At the same time one of his dearest friends and correspondents, the Rev. Mr. Bull, of Newport Pagnell, a dissenting minis- ter of deep piety and varied learning and abilities, put the poetry of Madame Guion into his hands, and engaged . him in the pleasant and beneficial labor of translating many of her pieces into English verse. In the letter to his friend Unwin, giving an account of this employment, he related in his exquisitely sportive way, an encounter which he had witnessed between a kitten and a viper, which he also threw into the shape of verse in that amusing piece of humor entitled the " Colubriad." Some of the most beautiful songs were also com- posed by the poet, for Lady Austen to set them to appropriate music, and play them upon the harp- sichord. One of these songs was the ballad on the " Loss of the Royal George," with Admiral Kem- penfelt and her whole crowded crew of eight hun- dred men. This was one of Cowper's most favorite compositions : " Toll for the Brave." He translated it into Latin. At the same time, or very near it, on the occa- sion of a story related by Lady Austen, he com- posed the humorous ballad of " John Gilpin," and the success of the effort had the happiest effect upon his own spirits. He was sinking into deep dejection. Lady Austen, who had been accus- tomed to try every possible resource for his relief, 194 JOHN GILPIN. observed with pain, in their evening circle, how the cloud was deepening, and remembering from her childhood the story of "John Gilpin," repeated it to Cowper with such admirable merriment and humor that, as Hayley says, " its effect upon his fancy had the air of enchantment." He told Lady Austen the next morning that the drollery took such possession of him that during the greater part of the night he had been kept awake by con- vulsions of laughter, brought on by the recollection of her story ; and indeed that he could not help turning it into a ballad. The piece immediately became celebrated, for his fiiend Unwin sent it at once to the " Public Advertiser." It was recited with great comic power by Henderson ; it made Cowper' s friends laugh tears ; and it proved an inexhaustible source of merriment with multitudes who never dreamed of Cowper being the author. " They do nor always laugh so innocently, and at so small an expense," said Cowper in a letter to his friend Unwin : " a melancholy that nothing else so effectually disperses, engages me in the arduous task of being merry by force ; and, strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the I mood ; and, but for that saddest mood, perhaps had never been written at nil." Three years afterward, while " The Task" was passing through the press, "John Gilpin." which had not even then been JOHN GILPIN. 195 published with Cowper's name, was recited by- Henderson at a series of nightly readings to crowded audiences in London. The ballad was repriDted from the old newspaper, and " Gilpin," passing at full stretch by " The Bell" at Edmon- ton, was to be seen in all the print-shops. One printseller sold six thousand, and Southey in- forms us that the profits of these recitations by a reader so unrivaled as Henderson, were eight hundred pounds. Southey says, that at the close of One of his performances, a person from the crowd wriggled up to him and exclaimed, " Pray, who did teach you to read, Mr. Henderson ?" " My mother, sir," was his reply. Newton told Cowper what amusement his famous horseman was giving to the public ; but the letter elicited a sad reply, (though not so sad as he sometimes wrote,) for he was now again passing, without the company of Newton, through the valley of the shadow of death. " I have pro- duced many tilings," said he, " under the influence of despair, which hope would not have permitted to spring. But if the soil of that melancholy in which I have walked so long has thrown up here and there an unprofitable fungus, it is well at least that it is not chargeable with having brought forth poison. Like you, I see, or think I can see, that Gilpin may have its use. Causes in appear- ance trivial produce often the most beneficial con- 196 JOURNEY TO CLIFTON. sequences ; and perhaps my volumes may now travel to a distance which, if they had not been ushered into the world by that notable horseman, they would never have reached." It was just about the time of the composition of this ballad that Cowper wrote another, for Lady Austen to compose the music, being a play- ful account of a journey attempted by Cowper and Mrs. Unwin to Clifton, the abode of Lady Austen's sister in their neighborhood. Cowper entitled it " The distressed Travelers, or Labor in vain, an excellent new song to a tune never sung before." This poem was published in the " Monthly Magazine" for January 1808, but from that time to the publication of Southey's edition of the works of the poet in 1836, was never printed in any col- lection : I sing of a journey to Clifton "We would have performed, if we could, Without cart or barrow to lift on Poor Mary and me through the flood. Slee, sla, slud, Stuck in the mud ; Oh, it is pretty to wade through a flood ! So away we went slipping and sliding Hop, hop, d la mode de deux frogs. 'Tis near as good walking as riding When ladies are dressed in their clogs. Wheels no doubt, Go briskly about, But they clatter, and rattle, and make such a rout ! JOURNEY TO CLIFTON. 197 SHE. Well now, I protest, it is charming ; How finely the weather improves 1 That cloud, though, is rather alarming ; How slowly and stately it moves I HE. Pshaw ! never mind ; 'Tis not in the wind ; "We are traveling south, and shall leave it behind. SHE. I am glad we are come for an airing, For folks may be pounded and penned, Until they grow rusty, not caring To stir half a mile to an end. HE. The longer we stay The longer we may ; It is a folly to think about weather or way. SHE. But now I begin to be frighted ; If I fall, what a way I should roll ! I am glad that the bridge was indicted — Stop ! stop ! I am sunk in a hole 1 Nay, never care 1 'Tis a common affair ; You '11 not be the last that will set a foot there. SHE. Let me breathe now a little, and ponder On what it were better to do ; That terrible lane I see yonder I think we shall never get through. HE. So I think, I, But by the by, "We never shall know, if we never should try. 198 J U B N E V TO CLIFTON. But should wo get there how shall we get home ? What a terrible deal of bad road we have past ! Slipping and sliding, and if we should come To a difficult stile, I am ruined at last. Oh this lane 1 Now it is plain, That struggling and striving is labor in vain. HE. Stick fast, then, while I go and look. SHE. Don't go away, for fear I should fall ! HE. I have examined it every nook, And what you have here is a sample of all. Come, wheel round ; The dirt we have found Would be an estate at a farthing a pound. Now, sister Ann. the guitar you must take. Set it, and sing it, and make it a song. I have varied the verse for variety's sake, And cut it off short because it was long. 'Tis hobbling and lame, Which critics won't blame, For the sense and the sound they say should be the Such pieces as these reveal a ruling charac- teristic of Cowper's mind, heart, and fancy. It was a propensity to fun and humor, as deep and genuine as ever accompanied or constituted the power of genius. But in the extreme it is a dan- gerous characteristic. It was in him so strong a disposition, that unless it had been repressed by the prevalence of his constitutional malady, it WIT CHASTENED. 199 must have worked mischief, must have absorhed and triumphed over the graver meditative power of his imagination, and might have ruled in his works to the exclusion of serious and religious themes, instead of sparkling in them, and sweetly, richly coloring and enlivening them. The tend- ency and habit of jocoseness, indulged and cher- ished, have gone sometimes even in clergymen to an extreme that has quite destroyed their useful- ness ; and, had it not been for Cowper's mental depression, perhaps he would have continued in life just as he says he set out, only to giggle and to make giggle. With such an exhilarating fount- ain of humor and enjoyment of wit, and such an irresistible proneness to laughable and comic de- scription, had he been permitted by uninterrupted health and elasticity of spirits to mingle freely with the polished circles of his family in high and fashionable life, the society by which he must have been surrounded would have borne him away upon its surface, and he never would have been known as " England's Christian poet." Perhaps it was necessary, for the consecration of his genius to the highest themes, to mingle that gloom of depression in the habit of his heart ; if so, then that exquisitely beautiful hymn, composed on the eve of his madness, had a meaning extended over his whole life, of which he little dreamed. CHAPTER XVII. COWPERS PASSION FOR FUN AND HUMOR. — THE DISCIPLINE TO BALANCE IT. — EXQUISITE LESSONS AND SCENES OF SOCIAL JOY IN HIS POEMS. — MINGLED SPORTIYENESS AND SOLEMNITY OF HI? LETTERS TO NEWTON. Performance in this world is often prevented by theoretical perfection ; and one evil has to be set to keep guard over another. The skillful work- man has to prepare his finest gold for use and workmanship with a portion of alloy. A cold day in nature is sometimes necessary to set the vegeta-- tion ; and storms are necessary to prevent even our finest weather from injuring us. Cowper's na- tive tendency to social pleasantry and humor per- haps needed to be chastened, or at least balanced, for under all his gloom the drollest recollections were sometimes uppermost in his mind. The only thing he remembered of his friend Hill's poetry in the Nonsense Club, in their early days, was the Homeric line, " To whom replied the Devil, yard- long tailed." Such snatches of ludicrous recollec- tions he is continually presenting in his letters ; one of them to Newton he finishes with a reference A MERRY HEART. 201 to Dr. Scott, of the close of whose sermon he gives Newton an account of a droll blunder made by the preacher, who, quoting a passage of Scripture, said to his hearers, " Open your wide mouths, and I will fill them." Now nothing is more delightful, more genial, and congenial than such a disposition. Deliver us from men who can not relish pleasantry, and, if need be, even in the midst of misery ; such men can not have your entire confidence, but are to be held as Shakspeare or Luther would have regarded men who hated music. " A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones/' But the ceaseless thirst and craving for amusement and merriment, as if it were the whole of life, is a fever that dries and consumes the soul . more fatally. A creature constituted with a very keen relish for the pleasures of a merry circle, and habituated to rely upon them, is not fitted to en- counter any change of weather, or to ride through rough seas. Such a person is like a vessel carelessly loaded with such materials, that there is danger of a sudden shifting of the cargo, and inevitable ship- wreck in consequence. Luxury gives the mind a childish cast, And while she polishes, perverts the taste. Habits of close attention, thinking heads, Become more rare as dissipation spreads, Till authors hear at length one general cry, Tickle and entertain us. or we die, 9* 202 A MERRY HEART. There is a higher quality. " Is any merry ? Let him sing psalms ;" that taste and faculty is the ce- lestial balance in the soul. If any man has learned to do that with the heart, he has learned it on such grounds as have taught him most solemnly and profoundly the madness of the man of mere mirth- fulness ; but there is room for happiness and joy in his affections, his mind, his whole being, to the utmost extent to which occasion may ever call for merriment. But until he has learned to do that, until he has gained that hope which is an anchor in eternity, the end of his mirth is heaviness ; for, " Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry," is the rule, but the heart of fools is in the house where such mirth reigns, and folly is joy, and joy is folly to him that is destitute of wisdom. That proverb also is as full of truth as pithiness,* that " the laughter of fools is like the crackling of thorns under a pot;" and persons who live for noth- ing but to giggle and make giggle are the most un- mirthful beings in the world. Cowper's early asso- ciates, when he knew nothing higher or better than worldly mirth, were sad illustrations. A creature suddenly paralyzed and stiffened in the act and attitude of boisterous laughter would be a hideous sight ; but an immortal being who knows nothing but giggling and merriment, and imagines that life has no other end than such uninterrupted enjoyment, SOCIAL HAPPINESS. 203 would be, to spiritual spectators at least, a much more deplorable spectacle. How beautiful, in this connection, are Cowper's lines on social life and conversation, along with that exquisite picture of the walk to Emmaus. Well might Cowper ask, Is sparkling wit the world's exclusive right ? The fixed fee-simple of the vain and light? Nay, does it not much rather belong to those who have received in fee-simple an eternal inheritance of love, joy, peace ? Assuredly the hope of heaven can not quench or obscure the play of a faculty whose happiest permanent abode is in that mind which is the most serene and thoughtful. Piety restrains and curbs its wantonness, and prevents it from assuming the part of the mere trifler, and thus at the same time gives it a usefulness unknown before, and makes it shine the brighter for its puri- fication. Such conclusions were the fruits of Cow- per's own experience, having tried both the paths of this world's merriment and of religious peace and joy ; and he has thrown the celestial knowledge he had gained into some of the most beautiful les- sons and pictures of his poetry. The mind dispatched upon her busy toil, Should range where Providence has bless'd the soil ; Visiting every flower with labor meet, And gathering all her treasures, sweet by sweet, 204 T UE WALK T u E M M AUS. She should imbue the tongue with what she sips, And shed the balmy blessing on the lips, That good diffused may more abundant grow, And speech may praise the power that bids it flow. Yet Fashion, leader of a chattering train, "Whom man for his own hurt permits to reign, Who shifts and changes all things but his shape. And would degrade her votary to an ape. The fruitful parent of abuse and wrong. Holds a usurped dominion o'er his tongue; Here sits and prompts him with his own disgrace, Prescribes the theme, the tone, and the grimace, And, wheu accomplished in her wayward school. Calls gentleman whom she has made a fooL 'Tis an unalterable fixed decree, That none could frame or ratify but she, That heaven and helU and righteousness and sin, Snares in his path, and foes that lurk within, God and His attributes (a field of day Where 'tis an angel's happiness to stray) Fruits of his love, and wonders of his might, Be never named in ears esteemed polite ; That he who dares, when she forbids, be grave, Shall stand proscribed, a madman or a knave, A close designer, not to be believed, Or, if excused that charge, at least deceived. The time is short, and there are souls on earth, Though future pain may serve for present mirth, Acquainted with the woes that fear or shame By fashion taught, forbade them once to name, And having felt the pangs you deem a jest, Have proved them truths too big to be expressed. Go seek on revelation's hallowed ground, Sure to succeed, the remedy they found ; Touched by that Power that you have dared to mock, That makes seas stable, and dissolves the rock, Your heart shall yield a life-renewing stream, That fools, as you have done, shall call a dream. It happened on a solemn evening tide, THE WALK TO B M M A U 8 . 205 Soon alter lie that was our Surety died, Two bosom friends, each pensively inclined, The scene of all those sorrows left behind, Sought their own village, busied as they went, In musings worthy of the great event. They spake of Him they loved, of Him whose life, Though blameless, had incurred perpetual strife, "Whose deeds had left, in spite of hostile arts, A deep memorial graven on their hearts. The recollection, like a vein of ore, The further traced, enriched them still the more. They thought Him, and they justly thought Him, one Sent to do more than He appeared to have done, To exalt a people, and to place them high Above all else ; and wondered He should die. Ere yet they brought their journey to an end, A stranger joined them courteous as a friend, And asked them, with a kind, engaging air, What their affliction was, and begged a share. Informed, He gathered up the broken thread. And, truth and wisdom gracing all He said, Explained, illustrated, and touched so well The tender theme on which they chose to dwell, That, reaching home, the night, they said, is near, We must not now be parted, sojourn here. The new acquaintance soon became a guest, And made so welcome at their simple feast, He bless'd the bread, but vanished at the word, And left them both exclaiming, '"T was the Lord ! Did not our hearts feel all He deigned to say, Did they not burn within us by the way ?" Now theirs was converse, such as it behooves Man to maintain, and such as God approves. Their views indeed were indistinct and dim, But yet successful, being aimed at Him. Christ and His character their only scope, Their object, and their subject, and their hope. They felt what it became them much to feel And, wanting Him to loose the sacred seal, Found him as prompt as their desire was true To spread the new-born glories in their view. 200" THE WALK T O KMMAU3. Well I what are ages, and the lapse of time, Matched against truths as lasting as sublime ? Can length of years on God Himself exact ? Or make that fiction which was once a fact? No ! marble and recording bras3 decay, And, like the graver's memory, pass away ; The works of man inherit, as is just, Their author's frailty, and return to dust. But truth Divine forever stands secure, Its head is guarded, as its base is sure ; Fixed in the rolling flood of endless years The pillar of the eternal plan appears. The raving storm and dashing wave defies, Built by that Architect who built the skies. Hearts may be found, that harbor at this hour That love of Christ, and all its quickening power, And lips unstained by folly or by strife, Whose wisdom, drawn from the deep well of life, Tastes of its healthful origin, and flows, A Jordan for the ablution of our woes. days of heaven, and nights of equal praise, Serene and peaceful as those heavenly days, When souls drawn upward in communion sweet, Enjoy the stillness of some close retreat, Discourse, as if released, and safe at home, Of dangers past, and wonders yet to come, And spread the sacred treasures of the breast Upon the lap of covenanted rest ! In contrast with this most attractive and de- lightful picture, let us note how the sight of the un- devout gayety of a thoughtless world, in one of the great exchanges of its mirthfulness, affected Cow- per. He is writing his friend Unwin in regard to the scenes at Brighton. " There is not, I think, so melancholy a sight in the world (a hospital is not to be compared with it) as that of a thousand T II eUQHTLESSNESS, 20T persons distinguished by the name of gentry, who, gentle perhaps by nature, and made more gentle by education, have the appearance of being inno- cent and inoffensive, yet being destitute of all re- ligion, or not at all governed by the religion they profess, are none of them at any great distance from an eternal state, where self-deception will be impossible, and where amusements can not enter. Some of them, we may say, will be reclaimed ; it is most probable, indeed, that some of them will, because mercy, if one may be allowed the expres- sion, is fond of distinguishing itself by seeking its objects among the most desperate class ; but the Scripture gives no encouragement to the warmest charity to hope for deliverance for them all. When I see an afflicted and unhappy man, I say to my- self, there is, perhaps, a man whom the world would envy, if they knew the value of his sorrows, which are possibly intended only to soften his heart, and to turn his auctions toward their prop- er center. But when I see or hear of a crowd of voluptuaries who have no ears but for music, no eyes but for splendor, and no tongue but for im- pertinence and folly, I say, or at least I see occa- sion to say, ' This is madness ; this, persisted in, must have a tragical conclusion. It will condemn you not only as Christians unworthy of the name, but as intelligent creatures. You know by the light of nature, if you have not quenched it, that 208 BPOBTIYENKS8. there is a God, and that a life like yours can not be according to His will/ " Some of Cowper's letters to Newton, as well as his other correspondents, are exquisitely sportive. His sense of the ludicrous was keen and. delicate, and no man that ever wrote English was happier in his descriptions of humorous and ridiculous scenes and encounters. We may refer, for illus- tration in his prose, to his letter to Newton, giving an account of the beadle thrashing the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable ; a story winch in rhyme would have made a rival of "John Gilpin/' and would give some original Cruik- shanks in engraving a subject of admirable humor. His description of the life of an Antediluvian, and also of the chase that took place in Olney on the escape of his tame hare, and of the donkey that ran away with the market-woman ; as also his letters in the form of prose, but in swift galloping metre, are happy illustrations of his native pro- pensity and power. Perhaps the very drollest letters in the whole of his private correspondence as well as the darkest and gloomiest, are to New- ton «j sufficiently refuting the ill-natured insinua- tion which we have already had occasion to notice on the part of Southey, that it seemed as if Cow- per always went to his correspondence with Newton as if he were a sinner going to the confessional, or toiling under a task. There are numerous inci- J, THE HARES Cbeever's Cowpei p. 2d- HUMOROUS LETTERS. 209 dental notices, as well as whole epistles, that demonstrate how very unjust any intimation of this nature must have been ; unjust to Cowper himself as well as Newton, and conveying an idea of con- straint, if not dissimulation, where there was never any thing but openness and freedom. For example, Cowper sent to Newton, in one of his letters, the following lines, entitled Mary and John : If John marries Mary, and Mary alone, 'Tis a very good match between Mary and John. Should John wed a score, oh the claws and the scratches ! It can't be a match ; 'tis a bundle of matches. In another letter, November 27, 1781, he refers to this trifle, and says to Newton, " I never wrote a copy of ' Mary and John' in my life, except that which I sent to you. It was one of those bagatelles which sometimes spring up like mushrooms in my imagination, either while I am writing, or just be- fore I begin. / sent it to you, because to you I send any thing that I think may raise a smile, but should never have thought of multiplying the im- pression." Now let us take, as additional instances of the familiar and playful attitude of his mind in his correspondence with Newton, first, an amusing let- ter, which beautifully sets forth his motive and man- ner in writing his admirable poem " On Charity ;" and second, as an example of the spontaneous ease 210 LETTERS TO NEWTON with which his thoughts flowed in the particular form of versification in which that poem was cast, his poetical letter to Mrs. Newton, thanking her for a present of oysters. Both these epistles were in the same year, 1781. " My very dear friend, I am going to send, what when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say I suppose, there 's nobody knows, whether what I have got, be verse or not ; — by the tune and the time, it ought to be rhyme ; but if it be, did ever you see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before ? " I have writ ' Charity/ not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good ; and if the * Reviewer' should say to be sure, the gentleman's muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace, and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern day ; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air, 'tis only her plan, to catch if she can, the giddy and gay, as they go that way. by a production of a new con- struction ; she has baited her trap, in the hoi snap all that may come, with a sugar-plum. His opinion in this will not be amiss ; 'tis what I in- tend, my principal end ; and if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have LETTERS TO NEWTON. 211 said, and all I have done, although I have run, many a time, after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and hy hook or by crook, write another book, if I live and am here, another year. " I have heard before of a room with a floor, laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in, you was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe or string,, or any such thing ; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penn'd, which that you may do, ere madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me. — W. C." The other epistle to Mrs. Newton is one of the happiest specimens of Cowper's perfectly natural and easy command of the best language, the apt- est familiar words, trooping spontaneously to their places in flowing and harmonious verse ; an illus- tration of what he once told Mr. Unwin, that when he thought at all, he thought most naturally in rhyme. 212 LETTERS TO N E W T O N A noble theme demands a noble versp, In such I thank you for your fine oysters. The barrel was magnificently large, But being sent to Olney at free charge, Was not inserted in the driver's list, And therefore overlooked, forgot, or missed. For when the messenger whom we dispatched Inquired for oysters, Hob his noddle scratched, Denying that his wagon or his wain Did any such commodity contain, In consequence of which, your welcome boon Did not arrive till yesterday at noon ; In consequence of which some chanced to die, And some, though very sweet, were very dry. Now madam says (and what she says must still Deserve attention, say she what she will) That what we call the diligence, becase It goes to London with a swifter pace, Would better suit the carriage of your gift, Returning downward with a pace as swift ; And therefore recommends it with this aim, To save at least three days, the price the same ; For though it will not carry or convey For less than twelve pence, send whate'er you may, For oysters bred upon the salt sea-shore, Packed in a barrel, they will charge no more. News have I none that I can deign to write, Save that it rained prodigiously last night ; And that ourselves were, at the seventh hour, Caught in the first beginning of the shower ; But walking, running, and with much ado, Got home, just time enough to be wet through, Yet both are well, and wondrous to be told, Soused as we were, we yet have caught no cold ; And wishing just the same good hap to ycu, We say, good madam, and good sir, adieu. • At a date some two years later than this, he tells Newton that he would as soon allow himself the liberty of writing a sheet full of trifles to one of LETTERS TO NEWTON. 213 the four Evangelists, as to him. But very speed- ily after that, we find him writing to the same friend with as much drollery as ever. The truth is, he always wrote according to the frame of his mind and feelings at the moment, and on whatever topic the train of association landed him when put- ting pen to paper, on that he wrote just what spon- taneously he thought and felt. The writing of letters was never irksome to him, though the be- ginning of them sometimes was. He told Newton in one of his letters in 1784, that the morning was his writing time, but in the morning he had no spirits, and therefore so much the worse for his correspondents. " As the evening approaches, I grow more alert, and when I am retiring to bed, am more fit for mental occupation than at any other time. So it fares with us whom they call nervous. The watch is irregularly wound up ; it goes in the night when it is not wanted, and in the day stands still." A year previous to this, he had been more de- jected and distressed than usual, so much so, that even a visit from Newton, " the friend of his heart, with whom he had formerly taken sweet counsel," not only failed to comfort him, but added, as he said, the bitterness of mortification to the sadness of despair. His nights were becoming a terror to him, and he told Newton that he was more and more harassed by dreams in the night, and more 214 L E T T E K S T O N E W TON. deeply poisoned by them in the following day. He feared a return of his malady in all its force. " I know the ground/' said he, " before I tread upon it. It is hollow ; it is agitated ; it suffers shocks in every direction ; it is like the soil of Calabria — all whirlpool and undulation." Happily, these terrible forebodings were not then fulfilled ; it was not till four years had elapsed that the dreaded prostration came ; and his letters continued to be as cheerful as usual. The following to Newton in 1784, beautifully shows what a combination of en- joyment in the rural sights and sounds of nature, and of solemn meditation on the verge of what seemed an eternal gloom, at once occupied his sensibilities. "My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we ever find it in the summer ; when, the winds being generally brisk, we can not cool it by admitting a sufficient quan- tity of air, without being at the same time incom- moded by it. But now I sit with all the windows and the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower, in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbor- RURAL SOUNDS. 215 hood resort to a bed of mignionette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monoto- nous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters are delightful, at least in this country. I should not, perhaps, find the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia very pleasing, but I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical, save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without an exception. I should not, indeed, think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlor for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common or in a farm-yard is no bad performer ; and as to insects, if the black beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I have no objection to any of the rest : on the contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's fine treble to the base of the humble bee, I admire them all. " Seriously, however, it strikes me as a very ob- servable instance of Providential kindness to man, that such an exact accord has been contrived be- tween his ear and the sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is almost every moment visited. All the world is sensible of the uncom- fortable effect that certain sounds have often upon the nerves, and consequently upon the spirits. 216 RURAL SOUNDS. And if a sinful world had been filled with such as would have curdled the blood, and have made the sense of hearing a perpetual inconvenience, I do not know that we should have had a right to complain. But now the fields, the woods, the gardens, have each their concert, and the ear of man is forever regaled by creatures who seem only to please them- selves. Even the ears that are deaf to the Gospel are continually entertained, though without know- ing it, by sounds for which they are solely indebted to its Author. There is somewhere in infinite space a world that does not roll within the pre- cincts of mercy, and as it is reasonable, and even Scriptural to suppose that there is music in heaven, in those dismal regions perhaps the re- verse of it is found ; tones so dismal as to make woe itself more insupportable, and to acuminate even despair. But my paper admonishes me in good time to draw the reins, and to check the descent of my fancy into deeps with which she is but too familiar." CHAPTER XVIII. LADY AUSTEN'S SUGGESTION OP " THE SOFA." — COMPOSITION OF li THE TASK;.'' — EXASPERATION' OF COWPER'S GLOOM. — PECULI- ARITIES AND CAUSES OF IT. In the early part of the summer of 1783, Lady Austen was endeavoring to prevail upon Cowper, as she had often done without success, to try his poetical powers in blank verse. At length he promised her that he would do so, if she would furnish him with a subject. " Oh," said she, "you can write upon any thing ; you can never be in want of a subject ; write upon this sofa." This answer, made without a moment's reflection, seems to have fallen like a kindling element, suggestive, exciting, into the poet's mind. Perhaps it roused up in a moment a train of domestic pictures, asso- ciations, enjoyments : at any rate it set Cowper to thinking, and forthwith he began a poem on that very theme, which wandered on, from subject to subject, from book to book, in pleasing, graceful variety, till it grew to the form of that finest pro- duction of his genius, " The Task," one of the 10 218 COMPOSITION OF most truly religious, yet one of the most popular poems in the English language. The first book, " The Sofa," was completed in August 1783, hav- ing been begun probably in June ; and in Novem- ber 1784, the whole poem had gone to the press. Cowper was, therefore, engaged upon it about a year and three months. He wrote sometimes an hour a day, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two hours ; and he says that he found it a severe exercise to mould and fashion the composition to his mind. Whether he was engaged upon a seri- ous or comic subject, he has himself remarked that the deep dejection of his spirits never seemed to interfere in the least degree with the activity of his mental powers. During the whole period of the composition of this exquisite poem, so tender and sacred in feel- ing, so rich and heavenly in religious thought, so inspired at once with the sweetest contrition and faith of a submissive and believing heart, and the sublimest fervor of devotion, Cowper's own religious gloom was almost uninterrupted. He thought himself shut out, by a particular edict, from God's mercy, excluded forever from heaven, and doomed to destruction. He thought that for him there was no access to the mercy-seat, that he had no right to pray ; indeed, he told his friend Mr. Bull, in one of his letters, that he had not asked a bless- ing upon his food for ten years, and did not expect THE TASK. 219 that he should ever ask it again. " Prove to rne," said he, " that I have a right to pray, and I will pray without ceasing ; yea, and pray too even in the belly of tins hell, compared with which Jonah's was a palace, a temple of the living God. But, let me add, there is no encouragement in the Scripture so comprehensive as to include my case, nor any consolation so effectual as to reach it." " And yet the sin by which I am excluded from the privi- leges I once enjoyed, you would account no sin ; you would tell me that it was a duty." In such passages as these we seem to be looking into the blackness of darkness ; it is an incompre- hensible mystery of madness and despair. The imaginary sin to which Cowper here refers, must have been his refusing to yield to the temptation, a second time presented in his insanity, of self- destruction, or his not renewing the attempt, when mercifully frustrated ; a temptation under the Sa- tanic infernal delusion of its being a sacrifice to which God called him, so that his not performing it had shut the door of God's mercy against him forever. Sometimes when he sat down to write his dearest friends, this impression, with unmiti- gated, intolerable severity, so burdened him, that he could write on nothing else than the topic of his religious woe. This was very naturally the case, most frequently in writing to Newton, with whom he once enjoyed so many years of brightest, 220 BURDEN OF DESPAIR. sweetest Christian fellowship, ineffably serene and delightful, the genuineness, truth, and heavenly origin of which, as the work of the Divine Spirit, he never for one moment doubted. He begins the first letter he wrote to Newton in the year 1784, just after the publication of " The Task," by saying that he could not indeed tell what events might happen in this new year of their existence, but that Newton might rest con- vinced that be they what they might, not one of them could ever come a messenger of good to his despairing lost friend. " It is an alleviation of the woes even of an unenlightened man, that he can wish for death, and indulge a hope at least that in death he shall find deliverance. But loaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended. Pass through whatever difficulties, dangers and afflictions I may, I am not a whit the nearer home, unless a dungeon may be called so. This is no very agreeable theme ; but in so great a dearth of subjects to write upon, and especially impressed as I am at this moment with a sense of my own condition, I could choose no other. The weather is an exact emblem of my mind in its present state. A thick fog envelops every thing, and at the same time it freezes in- tensely. You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and en- HABIT OF DESPAIR. 221 deavor to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it; but it will be lost labor. Nature revives again ; but a soul once slain, lives no more. The hedge that has been apparently- dead, is not so ; it will burst into leaf and blossom at the appointed time ; but no such time is ap- pointed for the stake that stands in it. It is as dead as it seems, and will prove itself no dissem- bler. The latter end of next month will complete a period of eleven years in which I have spoken no other language. It is a long time for a man, whose eyes were once opened, to spend in darkness ; long enough to make despair an inveterate habit ; and such it is in me. My friends, I know, expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of Divine truth, that he who once had possession of it, should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every case but my own. And why not in my own ? For causes which to them it appears madness to allege, but which rest upon my mind with a weight of immovable conviction." This letter carries us back for some solution of its gloomy mystery to the year 1773, when, after some recovery from the more immediate violence of the attack, the chaos and dethronement of his reason, even in passing away, left upon the air the black shadows of an eclipse, that supernatural darkness at noonday, that strange disastrous twi- 222 ilnl'K ECLIPSED. light, in the prevalence of which the birds that sing in the day-time retire to their nests, but all the beasts of the forest begin to creep forth, and the young lions roar after their prey. In that dread eclipse as to his own personal hope of ac- ceptance with God and of eternal mercy, that vailing of the light of the Sun of Righteousness, Cowper's reason (but not his affections) for the most part remained shrouded. Instead of his path being, in respect to its brightness and seren- ity, in accordance with God's prescribed rule and promise, as the path of the just, shining more and more unto the perfect day, the perfect day had come first with Cowper, and from that point there was a reversal of the rule, so that the shadows deepened and the gloom thickened till we lose sight of the progress of the saint, in the darkest and most impenetrable depths of the valley of death-shadows. It was as if he had set out from the Celestial City, and taken all Bunyan's vivid delineations backward, from the Land Beulah to the Valley of Humiliation, and the conflict with Apollyon, and the smoke and darkness of that other dread valley, which proved to him the Biver of Death, the end of his pilgrimage, the last of his gloom and sufferings forever. Ever since his attack in 1773, the settled type of his derangement had been the obstinate assur- ance that his own name was blotted from the SUBMISSION. 223 Book of Life. During that attack, he was at first unwilling to enter Newton's door ; but one day having been persuaded to make him a visit, he suddenly determined there to stay, and accord- ingly remained under Newton's care, in Newton's family, about eighteen months, when quite as sud- denly he came to the determination to return. Newton has described his submissiveness to God's will in an early period of this attack, in strong and affecting lanoTiasre. " In the beginning; of his dis- order/' says Newton, " when he was more capable of conversing than ho was sometimes afterward, how often have I heard him adore and submit to the sovereignty of God, and declare, though in the most agonizing and inconceivable distress, that he was so perfectly satisfied of the wisdom and recti- tude of the Lord's appointments, that if he was sure of relieving himself only by stretching out his hand, he would not do it, unless he was equally sure it was agreeable to His will that he should do it/' The same spirit of entire submission to God's will marked all the changes of his delirium. In October he attempted suicide, under the dread- ful impression that this was the Divine will made known for his obedience. The turn which his malady thus took was entirely unexpected, and it rendered the most incessant watchfulness abso- lutely necessary. That was while Mr. and Mrs. Newton were absent in Warwickshire ; but New- 224 DREAD DELUSION. ton has remarked that this very attempt at self- destruction was but a new form and proof of his dear friend's submission to God's will, "since it was solely owing to the power the Enemy had of impressing upon his distorted imagination that it was the will of God that he should, after the ex- ample of Abraham, perform an expressive act of obedience, and offer not a son but himself." That impression always remained by him, or rather the belief that he had forfeited God's mercy, and shut himself out from hope and heaven by not executing the will of Jehovah when it was made known to him, and the appointed opportu- nity had come. By letting that opportunity pass, he thought he had brought upon himself a per- petual exclusion from God's favor. For a long time he thought that even to implore mercy would be just opposing the determinate counsel of God. It was a state of mind that increased the anxiety of his friends in every recurrence of his disease, and tried their care and tenderness to the utter- most. In 1787, during the dreadful attack of several months' duration, he again attempted his own death, and would certainly have accomplished it, if Mrs. Unwin had not been providentially di- rected to the room where he had just suspended himself by the neck, and where he must have died in a few moments, had he not been instantly res- cued. From this last attack he recovered sud- DREAD DELUSION. 226 denly, without warning, like a man called at a word from death to life ; and no similar access ever took place, but soon after the year 1790 the gloom and dejection of spirits deepened from month to month into a thicker darkness and more painful distress. " Amid these dreadful temptations," says the Rev. Mr. Greatheed, who knew him intimately, and after his death published some account of his trials, with 'an interesting review of his life and character, " such was his unshaken submission to what he imagined to be the Divine pleasure, that he was accustomed to say, * If holding up my fin- ger would save me from endless torments, I would not do it against the will of God/ He never dared to enter a place of worship when invited to do so ; he has said, ' Had I the universe, I would give it to go with you ; but I dare not do it against the will of God {' " Sad sufferer under a delusion that seemed to set the very attributes and commandments of God against one another ! We do not wonder that Newton and Mrs. Unwin, and his strongest-minded and most religious friends spoke of it and regarded it as the power of the enemy. With the New Tes- tament before them, what could seem a more pal- pable and graphic renewal of those malignant, infernal possessions which drew the compassion of our Saviour, and required the exercise of His om- 10* 226 M E RCY I N T RIAL. nipotence. " Whom Satan hath bound, lo, these thirteen years !" Justly did they reason and be- lieve that something more than a natural power was here at work, and that only a supernatural interposition could effect a cure. Sad sufferer ! yet not so sad as happy, being under the care of God ; for He was with thee though thou knewest it not. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then Thou knewest my path ! Happy, since He who suffered thee to be thus tempted was able to save thee to the uttermost, was refining thee for greater usefulness, and was preparing for thee, out of this exceeding weight of trial, a far more exceed- ing and eternal weight of glory ! Xow and then Cowper would utter in his letters to his friends some sweet impressive sentiments, speaking of the sufferings of others, which are ap- plicable with peculiar power and beauty to his own case. How simple and touching the following words in regard to a lovely young person of unob- trusive, but genuine Christian grace and worth, that had just passed away ! u The world has its objects of admiration, and God has objects of his love. Those make a noise and perish ; and these weep silently for a short season, and then live for- ever." CHAPTER XIX. COOPER'S CHRISTIAN GRACES BLOOMING IN MID-WINTER. — DEPTH AND REALITY OF HIS PIETY PROVED EY HIS GLOOM. — ASSAULT OF COTVPERS ADVERSARY. — INFERNAL CONFLICTS. — INVISIBLE GRACE. — COWFER'S GREAT ENJOYMENT IN POETICAL COMPOSITION. It was a painfully vivid image with which Cow- per conveyed his mental state, when he said that a thick fog enveloped the landscape, and at the same time it was freezing intensely. Again and again we find ourselves inquiring, how could his affections continue so warm, so ardent, so benevo- lent, his interest so unabated in every good thing, his sympathy for others' woes so tender, and his grateful appreciation of the kindness of others so constant, his sensibilities undiminished to the last, and his feelings of admiration and love, susceptible of new friendships with congenial natures late in life ? His power of attraction over others was al- most a fascination ; and the frankness and cordial sincerity with which he took the new young friends to his heart, whom Providence ordained to meet and bless him on his lonely way were among the most delightful exhibitions of his nature. His own 228 G B B 1 S T I A N GRACES misery never made liiui misanthropic, but right the contrary ; for he was both grateful for his own blessings and joyful in the happiness of all around him. " The principal pleasure, indeed," remarks Mr. Greatheed, " that Cowper appeared to be capable of receiving, was that which he derived from the happiness of others. Instead of being provoked to discontent and envy, by contrasting their comforts with his own afflictions, there evidently was not a benefit which he knew to be enjoyed by others which did not afford him sensible satisfaction ; not a suffering they endured which did not add to his pain. To the happiness of those who were priv- ileged with opportunities of showing their esteem for him, he was most tenderly alive. The advance- ment of the knowledge of Christ in the world at large was always near his heart, and whatever con- cerned the general welfare of mankind was inter- esting to him, secluded as he was from the public, and, in common, from religious society. In like manner, from his distant retreat he viewed with painful sensations the progress of infidelity and of sin in every shape. His love to God, though un- assisted by a hope of Divine favor, was invariably manifested by an abhorrence of every thing he thought dishonorable to the Most High, and a de- light in all that tended to His glory/' Unassisted by a hope of the Divine favor ! This B L U Q ii 1 N G I :> V I N TER, 22U makes the continued development of Oowper'a piety most wonderful. Here was the bush burn- ing but not consumed. Here was the faith of submission, reverence, and love, glorifying God in the fires as truly, and with a martyr's endurance, as was ever manifested in the fiery furnace. And here was, not less manifestly, a form like unto the Son of God, though here His presence was known only in the patience and meekness of the sufferer, and not in the radiance of a visible shape. Yet it was Divine grace, nothing less and nothing else, that was shining. And if ever in one case more remarkably than in another, John Bunyan's beau- tiful imagery presented by his Interpreter was ful- filled, it was in Cowper's. " I saw in my dream that the Interpreter took Christian by the hand, and led him into a place where was a fire burning against a wall, and one standing by it, always cast- ing much water upon it to quench it ; yet did the fire burn higher and hotter." On the side where the malignant devil is pouring the torrent on the soul, you can not see the Lord Jesus pouring in the oil of Divine grace ; yet the invisible work is the strongest, and the Lord is the conqueror. " I will cool you yet," said Satan, " though I take seven years to do it ; you are very hot after Mercy now, but you shall be cool enough by and by." So thought the infernal adversary, when permitted to set himself against this child of God, at the 230 I N y EB N A L 1) 1: L U SION. very time when his combined piety and genius were beginning to put forth those precious blos- soms and fruits that were to prove like leaves of the tree of life for the healing of the nations. And the ingredient he was permitted to mingle in that torrent of temptation with which he would fain have overwhelmed Cowper, and utterly extin- guished the bright fire that was burning, the in- gredient with which he hoped to persuade him, as he once hoped in regard to Job, to curse God and die, was the terrible imagination that he was cut off forever from God's favor, that God had forgot- ten to be gracious, and that His mercy was clean gone for evermore. If he could persuade him to despair, he thought he was sure of his victim. For we are saved by hope, and the sanctifying power of faith acts always with victorious efficacy, only through the might of faith's watchword, by the earnest of the Spirit in the heart, looking unto Jesus, and exclaiming, " Who loved me, and gave Himself for me!" And though The vital savor of His name Restores our fainting breath, yet if a personal distrust can be made to take the place of confidence in Jesus, Such unbelief perverts the same To guilt, despair, and death. W R K F Til B T E M P TER. 231 Now this delusion of Cowper, that he was cut off forever from God's mercy, was certainly from below, not from above, the work of an Enemy, not of a Friend ; yet even the practical power of that delusion, and the result on which Satan had relied, could be prevented by the omnipotence of God's invisible grace. And if Cowper could have been carried by the Interpreter to the other side of the emblem, to behold the Divine Kedeemer secretly but continually pouring in the oil of Divine grace, to maintain the heavenly fire, then the secret of the mystery of God's dealings with him would have been known beforehand. He was bringing the blind by a way that they knew not. And if Cowper did not know, the angelic guardians — they that wait and watch ministering unto them who shall be heirs of salvation — must have known God's way, as they maintained for him this spiritual con- flict, and must have heard the voice saying, " My grace is sufficient for thee ; My strength shall be made perfect in thy weakness." So, said the Interpreter, " by means of the oil of Christ's grace, notwithstanding what the devil can do, the souls of His people prove gracious still. And in that thou sawest that the man stood be- hind the wall to maintain the fire, this is to teach thee that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul/' And hard indeed it was for Cowper to see ; yet still the 232 BUfiMI0SIO¥. work went on ; and though by the messenger of Satan he was not only buffeted, but distressed, 7 7 perplexed, and in despair, yet was he not forsak- en ; cast down he was, yet not destroyed ; and though seemingly always delivered unto death, yet the life that is hid with Christ in God was al- ways manifest. He whom it pleased and became to make the Captain of his saints perfect through suffering, in bringing many sons unto glory, passes the children of light also through many scenes of trial and of darkness. And Cowper certainly was one of those sons brought unto glory in the same way. Under this extreme severity of discipline, per- mitted as Cowper was, to be sifted as wheat by Satan, to be driven by the wind and tossed, to be distracted with frightful dreams in the night-time, and stared at and terrified by a stony-eyed fiend in the day-time, the projection and creation of an in- ward sullen despair ; permitted to be held in this torturing and frightful misapprehension of the Di- vine sovereignty in relation to himself, till he be- came as a withered and wrinkled goat-skin bottle in the smoke, till his very bones became as when one cutteth and eleaveth wood upon the earth ; yet all the while submissive to the Divine will, and in his melancholy misery, unselfish and unrepining to the last ; under such discipline there would really seem to have been in Cowper's gloomy and DESERTION. 283 despairing experiences more true piety than in many persons' confidences and hopes ; for his heart was filled all the while with a yearning after God and the light of His countenance, as the only relief and blessing which his soul desired. If any man could ever adopt Watts's energetic stanza as the expression of his own feelings, Cowper could ; Thy shining grace can cheer The prison where I dwell ; 'Tis Paradise if Thou art here, If Thou depart, 'tis hell I He could not he happy without God. He was unutterably miserable in the bare imagination that God had deserted him. The thought that God had forsaken him was more agonizing to him than a world of real miseries, temporal and not spiritual, ever could have been. But even beneath such a nightmare, such an agony, as the supposition of this abandonment by his best and only everlasting Friend, he would not, knowingly, for the universe, have gone in any respect contrary to the will of that Friend ; would not have chosen his own way in any thing which he might not feel was God's chosen way, or which he apprehended was contrary to God's will. Now a more convincing and affect- ing proof that he was a child of God, though walking in darkness, can hardly be imagined than this. He could have stayed himself, according to 234 A B A N 1) o N M ): N J' the direction given in the fiftieth chapter of Isaiah to those who find themselves "walking in darkness and without light, upon the name of the Lord ; but the terrible point, the unconquerable fatality of his delusion was, that the very name of the Lord was against him, and that consistency and truth on the part of God toward His own attri- butes required Cowper's destruction. We do not remember ever to have met with any other precisely sueh case on record ; for Cowper would reason himself into a demonstration on this point, and sometimes would unwind, to the astonishment and compassion of sympathizing friends, a portion of the chain of argument by which his soul was thus fettered ; he sets the door ajar, and lets you look into the darkness of his prison ; and though at the same time he sees the light, it is no light for him. The atmosphere of Divine mercy is all around him, but there is a vacuum also between his sonl and it, so that, as he conceives, it can not touch him, and the congruity of God's attributes forbids that it should. Water! water: cverv where, And never a drop to drink! The ladder even of Christian experience, Cowper once said, has its foot, its lowest rung, in the abyss ; and there he had stood, if any step above the infernal regions, yet only there, on that lowest KB E A L I T V . 235 round, amid the smoke and horror of thick dark- ness, accustomed only to infernal experiences, for thirteen years ! If this had been reality, it had been intolerable misery ; if it had been the mid- night of absolute despair, it must have produced lute madness. But it was a delusion, and not unaccompanied with some suspicions, and some- times actual hopes, of its being such, and there- fore it could be borne for a season. It had the unreality, yet at the same time the despotic op- pression, of a vivid dream. It was the hallucination of a mind insane on one idea, perfectly sound on every other. That one was indeed, in this case, a tremendous despot- ism, extending over Cowper's everlasting destiny (as he imagined) a certainty and immutability of woe. If it were a reality, instead of an imagina- tion, and /eft as a reality, it would leave no inter- val for cheerful occupation, it would permit no beguilement of its horror, nor forgetfulness of such a fate. But it was an imaginary despair ; and though the mental dejection, along with the nerv- ous derangement which was its physical cause, deepened and darkened even to the end, yet the misery of an absolute despair never could be in- flicted by it, nor ever was endured under it. With congenial mental occupation, gentle, tender, sym- pathizing friends, and a heart submissive, even in its darkest midnight mood, to God's will, Cowper 236 PBBSOVAL 1 X T E B E 8 T enjoyed much ; though as often as his attention reverted to that one point of his insanity, and be- came fixed upon it, all his sensibilities seemed transfixed and agonized there, and he could see and feel nothing but misery. Nevertheless, the general tone of his correspond- ence, his life, and his writings, up to a very late period, was cheerful. " The Task," though writ- ten throughout beneath that intensely freezing vail of gloom which he describes, is yet a cheerful poem ; neither joy nor frost is admitted in it to your sensibility or perception. A tender melan- choly runs through it indeed ; a pensiveness, deeply touching, and sometimes sad, but nothing of gloom. There is deep pathos, but yet a heavenly hope. Fountains of the purest happiness are opened up in it, of which you feel perfectly assured that the writer must himself have deeply tasted ; and scenes of delight and of sweet, heart-felt enjoyment are presented, of which you know that the poet him- self must have been a living part. Indeed there is not a poem in the English lan- guage that carries deeper conviction, or bears more indisputable, irresistible evidence of having sprung, In every part, from the original experience of the author. It is he himself, his own thoughts, feel- ings, wishes, manners, habits, tastes, enjoyments, present with you, and you can not mistake him for a miserable man. He is indeed a man of trials : OF THE TASK. 287 that is evident ; he has seen affliction, is beneath its sacred chastising influence even now, and is, like his beloved Master, " a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." And yet, he is on the whole, and in the highest sense, a happy man. You can not help feeling that the mind that from the treasures of its own experience, and the heart that from the fountain of its own emotions, could draw forth these rich and beautiful realities and forms of sacred thought and feeling, and take de- light in their array, must belong not only to a heavenly but a happy being. And this indeed was the real circle of Cowper's existence ; here was his own mansion, with its heavenly furniture and guests ; the other mood of his insanity was a separate dark cell, whither his heart never entered. His despair was the tyranny of a diseased reason ; a compulsion, unnatural and strange, upon his whole being ; but his devout thoughts, his religious feelings, his submission to God's will, his social sympathies, enjoyments, dis- interestedness, affectionate and sweet temper, were the habit of his disposition, his character, his na- ture. Hence in one of his letters to his friend Unwin he says that he never wrote any thing at second hand in his life ; all the web and woof of his poetry was out of his own experience, what he had himself thought, felt, believed, meditated, suf- fered, enjoyed ; all native, all original. In refer- 238 PERSONAL INTEREST. ence to his first poetical volume, lie said to the same friend, " I know there is in the book that wisdom which cometh from above, because it was from above that 1 received it. May they receive it too ! For whether they drink it out of the cis- tern, or whether it falls upon them immediately from the clouds, as it did on me, it is all one. It is the water of life, which whosoever drinketh shall thirst no more." Perhaps it may be set down as a ruling distinc- tion between imaginary and real despair, that whereas the first may co-exist with seasons of much cheerfulness, and march together sometimes with Laughter holding both his sides, the latter can never admit a sportive humor, or give way to the influence of playfulness or wit, though it come in the most irresistible form ever put on by innocent and harmless gayety. Bunyan has drawn a pic- ture of the Man of Despair, whose soul you would no more dream of enlivening with a sunbeam, or winning to the beauty of a smile by merriment or jest, than of beguiling the anguish of the lost by the harp of David. But in Cowper's mind, Despair and Wit, Melancholy and delightful Humor, went hand in hand, weeping and laughing at each other. In one and the same letter he would write such a description of his gloom and anguish, as would make the reader weep with sympathy, or stand in solemn awe. profoundly wondering, as before God's LETTERS TO NEWTON. 239 most inscrutable judgments ; and before the close, he would give you a thought, an incident, a sen- tence, or a melody, of such exquisite and sportive pleasantry, that the sight is more original and lovely than that of the fragrant flowers that hang blos- soming and smiling on the edge of a glacier. Thus the two halves of the same letter seem some- times the presence or the likeness of two separate beings. In one of his striking letters to Newton he says, " You complain of that crowd of trifling thoughts that pester you without ceasing ; but then you always have a serious thought standing at the door of your imagination, like a justice of peace with the riot-act in his hand, ready to read it and dis- perse the mob. Here lies the difference between you and me. My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bish- op's servants. They turn too upon spiritual sub- jects, but the tallest fellow, and the loudest among them all, is he who is continually crying, with a loud voice, Actum est de te ; periisti." This same letter he concludes with a series of sportive rhymes by way of a message to Mrs. Newton in regard to some proposed domestic purchases. Cocoa-nut naught, Fish too dear, None must be bought For us that are here. 240 r L A Y F r L N E S S OF Xo lobster on earth, That ever I saw, To me would be worth Sixpence a claw. So dear madam wait Till fish can be got At a-reas'nable rate, Whether lobster or not. Till the French and the Dutch Have quitted the seas, 4aid then send as much, And as oft as you please. And yet, in another letter to Newton he says, " I wonder that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellect, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if a harle- quin should intrude himself into the gloomy cham- ber where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would he unseasonable at any rate, but more especially so, if they should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter. But the mind, long wearied with the sameness of a dull, dreary prospect, w T ill gladly fix its eyes on any thing that may make a little variety in its contemplations, though it were but a kitten play- ing with her tail." But here it is to be remarked that in fact what renders the humor of Cowper so delightful is, that it is neither forced nor boisterous, neither put on for effect nor resorted to for provoking laughter either in himself or others ; but it is manifestly a cowper's humor. 241 native permeating clement, from a deep living sa- lient spring in his being ; a vein running through the whole empire of his mind and heart like a brook in green pastures. The sportive flashes of his wit are as native, genuine and playful, as artless and unpremeditated, as the serenest expressions of his piety are sincere, profound and thoughtful ; and both are as spontaneous as the rich droppings of a full honey-comb. The playfulness of Cowper, not being assumed, but really omnipresent and irresistible, had a native sweetness and power that, except in the intervals of real, despotic, overwhelm- ing insanity, gained the victory over his gloom ; nor was he at any time so utterly miserable as he con- ceived himself to be. Meantime, the lessons of his affliction were never forgotten by him ; he felt deeply his dependence upon Grod for every breath of his genius. There was this difference, he saiJ, between the generality of poets and himself ; " they have been ignorant how much they stood indebted to an Almighty power for the exercise of those talents they have supposed their own ; whereas I know, and know most perfectly, and am, perhaps, to be taught it to the last, that my power to think, whatever it be, and consequently my power to comjjose, is as much as my outward power afforded to me by the same hand that makes me in any respect to differ from a brute. This lesson, if not constantly incul- 11 242 COWPER'h EN J O Y M ENT cated, might, perhaps, be forgotten, or at least too slightly remembered." Thus it was that Cowper never wrote with wea- riness, never but with pleasure, never except spon- taneously ; and this was a great source and secret of his success. He said himself that there were times when he was no more of a poet than he was a mathematician, but at other times it seemed as easy for him to pour forth the sweetest thoughts and feelings, in the sweetest, simplest style, as for a child to breathe. He once said to his friend Unwin, as also to Lady Hesketh, that he was so formed as to be, in regard to pleasure and pain, in extremes ; whatever gave him any pleasure gave him much ; and he enjoyed much in the work of composition. It was an amusement that carried him away from himself ; or rather it transported him from his gloomy self to his radiant and hope- ful self under the light of heaven ; from the expe- rience of an imagined despair to that region of heavenly experience taught of God, amid thoughts of the richest wisdom, and feelings kindling with the theme ; emotions grateful, devout, affection- ate, crowding forth from the opened doors of that life hid with Christ in God, before which, at other times, despair kept such gloomy and forbidding watch, that there was no access to it, no commu- nion with it. The labor of his authorship on heav- enly themes was as the work of those who, passing IN COMPOSITION. 243 through the Valley of Baca, make it a well ; it was like Isaac's labor in digging the wells which the Philistines in their malignity had filled and sealed up with dirt and stones ; and in its happy result to himself, it was as a hand Divine reached down to draw him up from an abyss of wretchedness. " The quieting and composing effect of it," he told New- ton, " was such, and so totally absorbed have I some- times been in my rhyming occupation, that neither the past nor the future (those themes which to me are so fruitful in regret at other times) had any longer a share in my contemplation." This was just because, in meditating on these sweet celestial themes, he had retreated from the mob of accusing and despairing, tumultuous thoughts into that holy of holies, where his life was in a double sense hid with Christ in God. He stole away gradually, by such delightful occupation, from his own despair, and the Enemy found there was one secret recess which he could not enter, one pavilion where God could hide the troubled wan- derer from the strife of tongues. CHAPTER XX TENOR OF COWPER S LIFE AND EMPLOYMENTS. — THE IDLE AND THE BUSY MAN. — TRANSLATION OF HOMER, — HIS ACCOUNT OF THIS WORK TO NEWTON. In the year 1786, Cowper wrote to Lady Hes- keth, in reference to his mental malady, a letter descriptive of the same, from which we have al- ready quoted some passages. " It will be thirteen years in little more than a week/' said he, " since this malady seized me. Methinks I hear you ask — your affection for me will, 1 know, make you wish to do so — ' Is it removed ?' I reply, in great measure, but not quite. Occasionally I am much distressed, but that distress becomes continually less frequent, and I think less violent." " In the year when I wrote The Task — for it occupied me about a year — I was very often most supremely unhappy : and am, under G-od, indebted in a good part to that work for not having been much worse." This was written in January, a month, the recur- rence of which Cowper always dreaded, for it was in that month that his tremendous malady had cowper's employments. -245 seized him, and he feared its periodical return. But the style of this letter shows how cheerfully he could speak of his malady when he exerted himself to view it and describe it from the bright side. Cowper here says that while writing " The Task" he was often supremely unhappy ; it was a period in which he was threatened with a second recur- rence of his malady in all its force, and he suffered indescribably from dejection of spirits. Yet let us look from another point of view, and that Cowper's own point, chosen by himself in his poem, upon the tenor of his life and employments, and we shall see the same supremely unhappy person hap- pier than thousands whom the world call happy ; and even in his own conscious estimation not un- favored of his God, nor without deep and constant enjoyment. How various his employments, whom the world Calls idle ; and who justly in return Esteems that busy world an idler too ! Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, Delightful industry enjoyed at home, And Nature in her cultivated trim Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad — Can he want occupation, who has these ? Will he -be idle, who has much to enjoy? Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease, Not slothful, happy to deceive the time, Not waste it, and aware that human life Is but a loau to be repaid with use, When He shall call His debtors to account, 246 BUSY HOURS. From whom are all our blessings, business finds E'en here; while sedulous I seek to improve, At least neglect not, or leave unemployed, The mind he gave me ; driving it, though slack Too oft, and much impeded in its work, By causes not to be divulged in vain, To its just point, the service of mankind. He that attends to his interior self, That has a heart, and keeps it ; has a mind That hungers, and supplies it ; and who seeks A social, not a dissipated life, Has business ; feels himself engaged to achieve No unimportant, though a silent task. A life all turbulence and noise may seem To him that leads it, wise, and to be praised ; But wisdom is a pearl with most success Sought in still waters and beneath clear skies. He that is ever occupied in storms, Or dives not for it, or brings up instead, Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize. Now this and similar passages are truly descrip- tive of Cowper's own character and pursuits ; and while beguiled by such tastes and employments from the work of brooding over his own despondency, he was by no means so unhappy as he sometimes seems, in his letters. " My descriptions," says he, " are all from nature ; not one of them second- handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience ; not one of them borrowed from books, or in the least degree conjectural." Now the possessor of such an experience as Cowper frequently delineates can not be called unhappy, whatever local, or occasional, or even perpetual causes of dejection may weigh upon the AND HAPPY HOURS. 247 spirits. The pleasure of employment, after the publication of " The Task," was speedily transfer- red to the translation of Homer's Iliad. This was what Cowper himself called a Herculean labor, but he felt himself providentially called to it, and went through it with astonishing perseverance and ease. He began it the 12th of November, 1784. Writing in regard to it to Newton, he says, " For some weeks after I had finished The Task, and sent away the last sheet corrected, I was, through necessity, idle, and suffered not a little in my spirits for being so. One day, being in such distress of mind as was hardly supportable, I took up the Iliad, and merely to divert attention, and with no more preconception of what I was then entering upon, than I have at this moment of what I shall be doing these twenty years hence, translated the twelve first lines of it. The same necessity pressing me again, I had recourse to the same ex- pedient, and translated more. Every day bringing its occasion for employment with it, every day consequently added something to the work ; till at last I began to reflect thus : The Iliad and the Odyssey together consist of about forty thousand verses. To translate these forty thousand verses will furnish me with occupation for a considerable time. I have already made some progress, and I find it a most agreeable amusement." He set himself forty lines a day as his work, for a con- 248 WORK US' HOMES. stancy, translating in the morning and transcrib- ing in the evening. Sometimes he was very happy. " Wonder with me, my beloved cousin/ 1 he writes in a letter to Lady Hesketh, " at the goodness of God, who, according to Dr. Watts's beautiful stanza, — * Can clear the darkest skies, Can give us day for night, Make drops of sacred sorrow rise To rivers of delight.' As I said once before, so say I again, my heart is as light as a bird on the subject of Homer. Nei- ther without prayer nor without confidence in the providential goodness of God, has that work been undertaken or continued. I am not so dim-sighted, sad as my spirit is at times, but that I can plainly discern His providence going before me in the way. Unforeseen, unhoped-for advantages, have sprung at His bidding, and a prospect at first cloudy in- deed, and discouraging enough, has been continu- ally brightening." He had told Newton before, that he " had not entered on this work, unconnected as it must needs appear with the interests of the cause of God, without the direction of His provi- dence, nor altogether unassisted by Him in the performance of it. Time will show to what it ul- timately tends. I am inclined to believe that it has a tendency, to which I myself am, at present, perfectly a stranger. Be that as it may, He newton's m essiah. 249 knows my frame, and will consider that I am but dust." About this time he received from his friend Mr. Newton his new work on the Messiah, the acknowl- edgment of which was the occasion of a letter from Cowper, that reveals more of the depths of his spiritual distresses than almost any other passage in his writings. He told Newton that Adam's own approach to the Tree of Life, after he had sinned, was not more effectually prohibited by the flaming sword, that turned every way, than his to its great Antitype (the Lord Je- sus) had been for almost thirteen years, a short interval of three or four days, about a twelvemonth before, alone excepted. " For what reason it is that I am thus long excluded, if I am ever again to be admitted, is known to God only. I can say but this, that if He is still my Father, His pater- nal severity has, toward me, been such that I have reason to account it unexampled. For though others have suffered desertion, yet few, I believe, for so long a time, and perhaps none a desertion ac- companied with such experiences. But they have this belonging to them, that, as they are not fit for recital, being made up merely of infernal ingre- dients, so neither are they susceptible of it ; for I know no language in which they could be expressed. They are as truly things which it is not possible for man to utter, as those were which Paul heard 11* 2jU letter to h e w t u >' . and saw in the third heaven. If the ladder of Christian experience reaches, as I suppose it does, to the very presence of God, it has nevertheless its foot in the abyss. And if Paul stood, as no doubt he did, in that experience of his to which I have just alluded, on the topmost round of it, I have been standing, and still stand, on the lowest, in this thirteenth year that has passed since I de- scended. In such a situation of mind, encompassed by the midnight of absolute despair, and a thou- sand times rilled with unspeakable horror, I first commenced as an author. Distress drove me to it, and the impossibility of subsisting without some employment still recommends it. " I am not, indeed, so perfectly hopeless as I was, but I am equally in need of an occupation, being often as much and sometimes even more worried than ever. I can not amuse myself, as I once could, with carpenters' or with gardeners' tools, or with squirrels and guinea-pigs. At that time I was a child. But since it has pleased God, whatever else He withholds, to restore to me a man's mind, I have put away childish things. Thus far, therefore, it is plain that I have not chosen or prescribed to myself my own way. but have been providentially led to it ; perhaps I might say with equal propriety compelled and scourged into it ; for certainly, could I have made my choice, or were I permitted to make it even now, those hours which SUBMISSION. 251 1 spend in poetry, I would spend with God. But it is evidently His will that I should spend them as I do, because every other way of employing them He himself continues to make impossible. If in the course of such an occupation, or by inevitable consequence of it, either my former connections are revived, or new ones occur, these things are as much a part of the dispensation as the leading points of it themselves. If His purposes in thus directing me are gracious, He will take care to prove them such in the issue, and in the meantime will pre- serve me (for He is as able to do that in one con- dition of life as another) from all mistakes in conduct that might prove pernicious to myself, or give reasonable offense to others. I can say it as truly as ever it was spoken, ' Here I am ; let Him do with me as seemeth Him good/ " Again, at a date not far from the other, 1785, he remarks in a similar strain, " Of myself, who once had both leaves and fruit, but who now have neither, I say nothing, or only this, that when I am overwhelmed with despair, I repine at my bar- renness, and think it hard to be thus blighted ; but when a glimpse of hope breaks in upon me, I am contented to be the sapless thing I am, know- ing that He who has commanded me to wither, can command me to flourish again when he pleases. My experiences, however, of this latter kind, are rare and transient. The light that reaches me can 252 c tt E R R r d J. a i: ss. not be compared either to that of the sun or of the moon. It is a flash in a dark night, during which the heavens seem opened only to shut again." It might be supposed, if this letter were the whole ground of our judgment, that at this time Cowper was supremely miserable ; but there are other letters, close upon the same date, and some to Newton himself, showing that it was far other- wise. He was greatly animated and cheered just then by the prospect of a visit from his beloved and accomplished cousin, Lady Hesketh ; and he told her that he believed it would be a cordial to his nervous system. "Joy of heart," said he, " from whatever occasion it may arise, is the best of all nervous medicines ; and I should not wonder if such a turn given to my spirits should have even a lasting effect of the most advantageous kind upon them. You must not imagine, neither, that I am on the whole in any great degree subject to nerv- ous affections. Occasionally I am, and have been these many years, much liable to dejection ; but at intervals, and sometimes for an interval of weeks, no creature would suspect it. For I have not that which commonly is a symptom of such a case, belonging to me — I mean extraordinary ele- vation in the absence of the blue devil. When I am in the best health, my tide of animal spright- liness flows with great equality, so that I am never THE HAPPY TRIO. 253 at any time exalted in proportion as 1 am some- times depressed. My depression has a cause, and if that cause were to cease, I should be as cheer- ful thenceforth, and perhaps forever, as any man need be." He also wrote to Newton, after Lady Hesketh's arrival, that he felt himself " well content to say, without any enlargement on the subject, that an inquirer after happiness might travel far, and not find a happier trio than meet every day either in our parlor or in the parlor of the vicarage." It was in the vicarage that Lady Hesketh had taken up her residence, and in her parlor the trio, so happy and so pleasant, met every other day. " I will not say," he continues, " that my part of the happiness is not occasionally somewhat dashed with the sable hue of those notions concerning myself and my situation that have occupied, or rather pos- sessed me so long ; but, on the other hand, I can also affirm that my cousin's affectionate behavior to us both, the sweetness of her temper, and the sprightliness of her conversation, relieve me in no small degree from the presence of them." It was much that Cowper could bring himself to speak at this time of the forms of his spiritual despondency as notions. It was not always from such a point of view, or in such a light, that he was enabled to regard them. They tyrannized over his mind, so that he dared not look them in 254 A SOUL DESERTED. the face, and contradict or question them. They possessed him with such a morbid dread and help- lessness, that he felt in their presence somewhat as he used to do, when a little, timid, trembling boy at school, he dared look no higher than the shoe-buckles of the older tyrants. At times they closed upon him in grim reality. " Yesterday was one of my terrible seasons. The grinners at ' John Gilpin' little dream what the author sometimes suffers." When again he entered into the cloud, it was no longer a notion. Speaking of the old dwelling at Olney, after they had left it, "Never," says he, "did I see so forlorn and woeful a spectacle. Deserted of its inhabit- ants, it seemed as if it could never be dwelt in forever. The coldness of it, the dreariness, and the dirt, made me think it no unapt resemblance of a soul that God has forsaken. While He dwelt in it, and manifested Himself there, He could cre- ate His own accommodations, and give it occasion- ally the appearance of a palace ; but the moment He withdraws, and takes with Him all the furni- ture and embellishment of His graces, it becomes what it was before He entered it — the habitation of vermin and the image of desolation. Sometimes I envy the living, but not much, or not long ; for while they live, as we call it, they too are liable to desertion. But the dead who have died in the F I C T It E OF HIMSELF. 255 Lord, I envy always ; for they, I take it for granted, can be no more forsaken." In Cowper's earlier poem of " Retirement," there is presented a picture of the melancholy patient of " virtuous and faithful Heberden," who was Cowper's physician in his first attack of madness ; a picture of himself, affectingly true to the life, when under the power of his dreadful and un- searchable malady. Look where he comes ! in this embowered alcove Stand close concealed, and see a statue move : Lips busy, and eyes fixed, foot falling slow, Arms hanging idly down, hands clasped below, Interpret to the marking eye distress, Such as its symptoms can alone express. That tongue is silent now ; that silent tongue Could argue once, could jest, or join the song, Could give advice, could censure or commend, Or charm the sorrows of a drooping friend. Renounced alike its office and its sport, Its brisker and its graver strains fall short ; Both fail beneath a fever's secret sway, And like a summer brook are passed away. This is a sight for pity to peruse, Till she resemble faintly what she views ; Till sympathy contract a kindred pain, Pierced with the woes that she laments in vain. This, of all maladies that man infest, Claims most compassion, and receives the least. Job felt it, when he groaned beneath the rod, And the barb'd arrows of a frowning God ; And such emollients as his friends could spare, Friends such as his for modern Jobs prepare. Man is a harp, whose chords elude the sight, Each yielding harmony, disposed aright ; The screws reversed (a task which if He please 256 pic t i: b b o r u i ii s e l w . God in a moment executes with ease) Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose, Lost, till lie tune them, all their power and use. Then neither heathy wilds, nor scenes as fair As ever recompensed the peasant's care, Nor soft declivities with tufted hills, Nor view of waters turning busy mills, Parks in which Art Preceptress Nature weds, Nor gardens interspersed with flowery beds, Nor gales that catch the scent of blooming groves, And waft it to the mourner as he roves, Can call up life into his faded eye, That passes all he sees unheeded by. No wounds like those a wounded spirit feels, No cure for such, till God, who makes them, heals. And thou, sad sufferer under nameless ill, That yields not to the touch of human skill, Improve the kind occasion, understand A Father's frown, and kiss His chastening hand. To thee the day-spring and the blaze of noon, The purple evening and resplendent moon, The stars that sprinkled o'er the vault of night Seem drops descending in a shower of light, Shine not, or undesired and hated shine, Seen through the medium of a cloud like thine; Yet seek Him, in His favor life is found, All bliss beside a shadow or a sound : Then heaven eclipsed so long, and this dull earth Shall seem to start into a second birth. Nature, assuming a more lovely face, Borrowing a beauty from the works of grace, Shall be despised and overlooked no more, Shall fill thee with delights unfelt before, Impart to things inanimate a voice, And bid her mountains and her hills rejoice. The sound shall run along the winding vales, And thou enjoy an Eden ere it fails. Both the gloom and the gladness of this picture were drawn from Cowper's own profound expe- I H E H E A V E N L Y UKE. 257 rience ; he had known the screws reversed, the chords jarring in conflict and chaos ; and he had known the harp tuned again by the Maker, and yielding a celestial melody. He had known the wounded spirit, and the heavenly cure. No poet on earth ever descended into such depths, and came forth again from them, to sing on earth strains so resembling those that employ the happy spirits in heaven. If the desire of Satan to have and to sift as wheat those whom he sees most likely to make a breach in his kingdom, were always attended with a result so mortifying, one would think he must, ere this, have changed his mode of tactics. And, indeed, in spiritual as well as temporal things, it may be said, That Satan now 's grown wiser than of yore, And tempts by making rich, not making poor. If he can make any one say, " I am rich and in- creased with goods, and have need of nothing," lie is very near the accomplishment of his purposes ; but very far from it while he merely succeeds in keeping the soul troubled, distressed, and self- despairing. CHAPTER XXI. COWPER'S HAPPY EXPERIENCE. — HIS RELIGIOUS ENJOYMENT OF NATURE. — GENIUS AND HUMILITY. — DANGER AND DISCD7LINE. — SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN THE FURNACE. — MALADY IN ] 787. It was with an eye and heart thus blissfully en- lightened that Cowper had been taught to look upon Nature ; and inasmuch as he has told us that, both in his delineations of Nature and of the hu- man heart, he had drawn all from experience, and nothing from second-hand, we can not but per- sonify the author when we read those exquisite pas- sages in " The Task" descriptive of the filial delight with which the Christian child and freeman looks forth upon the works of God. The poet that could write, out of his own experience, the close of the fifth book of " The Task," « The Winter Morning Walk," and that of the sixth book also, " The Winter Walk at Noon," must himself have been the happy man, appropriating Mature as his Fa- ther's work, must himself have felt the dear, filial relationship, the assurance of a Father's love, and of a child's inheritance in heaven. Not withstand- THE SPELL BKOKEN. 259 ing the cloudy, fathomless, despairing deeps through which his soul, much of the time, had to struggle, yet it was he himself that felt compelled to ex- claim, when gazing forth into the blue abyss upon those starry hosts that navigate a sea that knows no storms, My Father made them all ! His soul, Much conversant with heaven, did often hold, With those fair ministers of light to man That fill the skies nightly with silent pomp, Sweet conference. There was a morbid, brooding obstinacy in his mental malady, a sullen and inveterate self-tor- menting ingenuity of argument, and perverseness of conclusion against himself, that held him for a while, held him habitually, while he listened to himself; but sometimes the spell was broken, oftener, indeed, than his black-browed accusers suffered him to admit, and he enjoyed with his whole heart the opening heavens, and received sweet earnest of the presence of his God. With animated hopes my soul beholds, And many an aching wish, your beamy fires, That show like beacons in the blue abyss, Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home From toilsome life to never-ending rest. Love kindles as I gaze. I feel desires That give assurance of their own success, And that, infused from heaven, must thither tend. It must have been in the deep consciousness of communion with his Maker, in the profound ex- 260 C W P B B U N T II B M<> D M T perience of gratitude, and faith, and love, that he wrote those closing lines of the fifth book of " The Task." He may have had to go down from the mount immediately afterward, to converse with suffering and gloom ; but he was on the mount then, a mount of transfiguration, and the Lord of Nature and of Grace was there, communing with him. A voice is heard, that mortal ears hear not, Till Thou hast touched them ; 'tis the voice of song, A loud hosanna sent from all Thy works ; Which he that hears it with a shout repeats, And adds his rapture to the general praise. In that blessd moment, Nature throwing wide Her vail opaque, discloses with a smile The Author of her beauties, who, retired Behind His own creation, works unseen By the impure, and hears His power denied. Thou art the source and center of all minds, Thou only point of rest, Eternal Word ! From Thee departing, they are lost and rove At random, without honor, hope, or peace. From Thee is all that soothes the life of man, His high endeavor, and his glad success. His strength to suffer and his will to serve. But Thou bounteous Giver of all good ! Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the Crown ! Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor, And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away. One may say with perfect truth that if all Cow- per's sufferings had taught, or enabled him t;> write, only those two hist lines ; yet, teaching him that, as his own deep experience, they were well eru- dured, they were infinitely precious. Nevertheless, AND IN THE VALLEY. 261 hidden so often and so long from the enjoyment of the light he was the means of communicating to others, Cowper's case is a most extraordinary illus- tration of the grand poetical aphorism, " Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves." God will so " seal instruction," according to that wondrous revelation of the manner of His dealings with those whom He means to save, in the thirty-third chapter of the Book of Job, as to " hide pride from man/' He will seal His most precious gifts with the great seal of humility. He did so with Cowper. The possession and exercise of such surpassing powers of genius would have been dangerous and self-pernicious otherwise. And therefore perhaps it was, that not till he was fifty years of age, and not till he had passed through a baptism of such suffering in the valley of the shadow of death as few men upon earth have encountered, did God permit the genius of Cowper to unfold itself, and the tide of inevitable praise to set in upon him. And even then He so disciplined Cowper, as to make him feel as if that very genius were rather an external angel, com- missioned of God to help him through his suffer- ings, than an inward self-possession, which he could command and exercise at will. He was naturally ambitious of distinction ; what fallen mortal ever was not ? and in any period of elevation, when the 262 COWPER ON THE MOUNT load of his misery was lightened and his health and spirits rose, he found, and felt, and acknowledged this tendency, this passion, and knew that he needed God's chastising hand. And yet, at the same time, when in the depths of spiritual dis- tress, he felt as though the very last dregs of that passion had been wrung out from him, as though the arrplauses of a world could not affect him, as though the Arch-Enemy himself could never again touch him with that dart. There are two extraordinary letters written, the one to his friend Newton, the other to Lady Hes- keth, both of surpassing interest, but still more deeply interesting when compared ; written in different states of mind, yet at times very near each other ; which show at once how deeply he had been made to understand himself, and yet how much less he knew of himself than God knew for him ; how clearly in the abyss he could see the darkness, yet how soon upon the mount he might become insensible to the danger. "God knows," he said to Newton in 1785, "that my mind having been occupied more than twelve years in the contemplation of the most distressing subjects, the world, and its opinion of what I write is become as unimportant to me as the whistling of a bird in a bush." If the world did not approve him, he thought that would not trouble him. " And as to their commendations, if I should chance to AND IN THE VALLEY. 263 win them. I feel myself equally invulnerable there. The view that I have had of myself for many years has been so truly humiliating, that I think the praises of all mankind could not hurt me. God knows that I speak my present sense of the matter at least most truly, when I say that the admira- tion of creatures like myself seems to me a weapon the least dangerous that my worst enemy could employ against me. I am fortified against it by such solidity of real self-abasement, that I deceive myself most egregiously if I do not heartily de- spise it. Praise belongeth to God ; and I seem to myself to covet it no more than I covet Divine honors. Could I assuredly hope that God would at last deliver me, I should have reason to thank Him for all that I have suffered, were it only for the sake of this single fruit of my affliction, that it has taught me how much more contemptible I am in myself than I ever before suspected, and has re- duced my former share of self-knowledge (of which at that time I had a tolerably good opinion) to a mere nullity in comparison with what I have ac- quired since. " Self is a subject of inscrutable misery and mis- chief, and can never be studied to so much advan- tage as in the dark ; for as the bright beams of the sun seem to impart a beauty to the foulest objects, and can make even a dunghill smile, so the light of God's countenance, vouchsafed to a fallen crea- 264 COWPER OX THE MOUNT tare, so .sweetens him and softens him for the time, that he seems both to others and himself to have nothing savage or sordid about him. But the heart is a nest of serpents, and will be such while it continues to beat. If God cover the mouth of that nest with His hand, they are hush and snug ; but if He withdraw His hand, the whole family- lift up their heads and hiss, and are as active and venomous as ever. This I always professed to be- lieve from the time that I had embraced the truth, but never knew it as I do now." Here is deep self-knowledge, and yet the ground and possibility of self-forgetfulness and self-de- ception. Dear, afflicted friend, (Newton might have written to him,) may God keep you in His hand, safe from the treacherous praises of the world, till He take the whole brood and family of serpents out of your heart ; for till He does that with us, then only are we safe ; and meanwhile He will bum them out, with our hearts in the hottest crucible, if there be no other way. But beware of Peter's word, nor confidently say, even in regard to what seems now so worthless to you as human applause, It never can hurt me, but grant it never may ! Nor was even Cowper, with all his tremendous gloom and mental suffering, yet out of danger. The letter to Lady Hesketh is a frank, sincere avowal in an interval of brighter spirits, of the AND IN THE VALLEY. 265 ardent thirst for fame which he knew to be in him ; but it seems clear that in the light it did not appear quite so glaringly to be one of the brood of serpents, hush and snug, as it had done in the dark. " I am not ashamed/' he says to his beloved cousin, " to confess that having commenced an au- thor, I am most abundantly desirous to succeed as such. I have (what, perhaps, you little suspect me of) in my nature an infinite share of ambition. But with it I have at the same time, as you well know, an equal share of diffidence. To this com- bination of opposite qualities it has been owing, that till lately I stole through life without under- taking any thing, yet always wishing to distinguish myself. At last I ventured, ventured too in the only path that, at so late a period, was yet open to me ; and am determined, if God have not deter- mined otherwise, to work my way through the obscurity that has been so long my portion, into notice. Eveiy thing, therefore, that seems to threaten this my favorite purpose with disappoint- ment, affects me nearly. I suppose that all ambi- tious minds are in the same predicament. He who seeks distinction must be sensible of disappoint- ment exactly in the same proportion as he desires applause. " And now, my precious cousin, I have unfolded my heart to you in this particular without a speck of dissimulation. Some people, and good people, 266 A NEW ATTACK too, would blame me. But you will not ; and they, I think, would blame without just cause. "We certainly do not honor God when we bury, or when we neglect to improve, as far as we may, whatever of talent He may have bestowed upon us, whether it be little or much. In natural things as well as in spiritual, it is a never-failing truth that to him who hath, that is, to him who occupies what he hath diligently, and so as to increase it, more shall be given. Set me down, therefore, my dear, for an industrious rhymer, so long as I shall have the ability. For in this only way is it possible for me, so far as I can see, either to honor God or to serve man, or even to serve myself/' But God, in Cowper's case, would " hide pride from man." He still kept him in the furnace, and again and again permitted all the waves and bil- lows of an almost infernal despair to go over him. In 1787, in the dreaded month of January, in the midst of his labors on Homer, a severe access of his malady prostrated him so completely, that for six months he could not put pen to paper. The at- tack, he afterward told Newton, could not be of a worse kind. It was foreboded by a nervous fever, which he told Lady Hesketh was attended with much dejection, and kept him during a whole week almost sleepless. During this season of almost madness, the sight of any face except Mrs. Unwin's was to him an insupportable grievance ; even New- SUDDEN RECOVERY. 2G7 ton could not see him ; and indeed during the whole time his mind was laboring under a disbe- lief of Newton's personal identity, with a convic- tion that for thirteen years he had been correspond- ing with him as a friend, under the disagreeable suspicion all the while of his being not a friend, but a stranger. " Never was the mind of man," said he, in his first letter to Newton announcing his recovery, " benighted to the degree that mine has been. The storms that have assailed me would have overset the faith of every man that ever had any; and the very remembrance of them, even after they have been long passed by, makes hope impossible/' From this dreadful condition of mind he says that he emerged suddenly, without the slightest previous notice of the change, and how long it might last they were wholly uncertain. However, he soon resumed his correspondence and his literary labors, and his health and spirits con- tinued for a season to improve. There were occasions on which Cowper evidently felt himself entirely free from any disorder, a man, by the blessing of God, perfectly well, both in- wardly and outwardly. For example, he writes to his young friend and kinsman Johnson, under date of 1791, and speaks of the disorder of his spirits, to which he has been all his life subject. " At present," says he, " thank God, I am perfectly well, both in mind and body." 268 LABOBfl OM BOX1B, Again, in the same year, in a letter to Mrs. King, he says, after speaking of his insupportable melan- choly, " This is the first day of my complete re- covery, the first in which I have perceived no symptoms of my terrible malady.'" But such delightful seasons of freedom from gloom were transitory : the malady resumed its reign ; and he told Mrs. King that in the depths of it he wrote " The Task" and the volume that preceded it; " and in the same deeps I am now translating Homer." The industry, resolution, and perseverance which it required to struggle on through such a work, under such discouragements, were by themselves evidences of a very powerful mind, not at all unbalanced or weakened by the oppressive burden even of despair. The work com- pelled him to the utmost closeness of application. In one of his letters to Mrs. King he curiously dis- closes the perpetual labor, whether at home or abroad, in which it had involved him. There was not a scrap of paper belonging to him that was not scribbled over with blank verse, and on taking her letter from a bundle to answer it, he found it inscribed with scraps of Homer. He quoted the lines, and told her that when he wrote them he was rambling at a considerable distance from home. Setting one foot on a mole-hill, and placing his hat, with the (Town upward, on his knee for a writing- desk, he laid her letter upon it. and with his pencil . LUDICROUS COMPARISON. 269 scribbled the fragment that he might not forget it. In this way he had written many and many a pas- sage of the work, and earned it home to be incor- porated in the translation. During these years, most unfortunately thus hampered with this great undertaking, he might have written many original poems, for he was often in the mood for it, but his appointed task would not permit it ; he could not take the time. In one of his letters to Lady Hesketh he gave her a ludicrous heroic comparison, after the manner of Homer, to account for his producing so few occa- sional poems, and for his withholding the very few that he did produce. " A thought sometimes strikes me before I rise ; if it runs readily into verse, and I can finish it before breakfast, it is well, otherwise it dies and is forgotten ; for all the sub- sequent hours are devoted to Homer. Fine things, indeed, I have few. He who has Homer to tran- scribe, may well be contented to do little else. As when an ass, being harnessed with ropes to a hand- cart, drags with hanging ears his heavy burden, neither filling the long-echoing streets with his harmonious bray, nor throwing up his heels behind, frolicsome and airy, as asses less engaged are wont to do ; so I, satisfied to find myself indispensably obliged to render into the best possible English meter eight-and-forty Greek books, of which the two finest poems in the world consist, account it 270 ORIGINAL POEMS quite sufficient if I may at last achieve that labor, and seldom allow myself those pretty little vagaries in which I should otherwise delight, and of which, if I should live long enough, I intend hereafter to enjoy my fill." Cowper's fragmentary poem on " Yardley Oak," and that on the " Four Ages," are examples of what he might have produced, had leisure and serenity of mind been vouchsafed ; indeed we may say, had his time been at his own disposal, even amid all the anxiety and distress that by day and by night had become the habit of his being. But the sounds of despair, to which he appeared to be perpetually listening, seemed not in the least to interfere with the play of his original inventive and suggestive faculty of genius. They no more pre- vented the vigorous exercise of thought and imagi- nation in their richest moods, than the thunder of the Cataract of Niagara hinders the pine forests from waving or the flowers from blossoming, or withholds the birds from their melodies, or the grass from its greenness. Nay, the pressure of despond- ency and gloom seemed to give a solemn grandeur and compactness to his trains of thought ; and those fragments to which we have referred stand like majestic Propyheums, behind which there is found indeed no temple, but which irresistibly im- press the spectator with the sublimity and vastness of the conception that must have filled the mind PREVENTED BY HOMER. 271 of the architect. The " Four Ages/' judging from the beginning, would have been a still sublimer and more profound poem than " The Task." Something the same grand train of thought seems to have been commenced as in " Yardley Oak," but it breaks off just at the commencement, just merely when the impression is left of a mighty and glorious region before you, through which you are to be conveyed, but as in a dream the power quits you, and you fall and wake. Or, as when you have been carried to the summit of a mountain, and suddenly, instead of the disclosure of a glorious, illimitable landscape, an impenetrable ocean of mist is rolling before you. There must have been a consciousness of these powers in Cowper's mind ; he could not have begun such poems, and in such a manner begun them, without the vivid feeling of what he could accom- plish, by the Divine blessing ; and it must have been with a deeper feeling of sorrow and disap- pointment, or constraint, than at any time he ex- presses, that he found himself compelled to turn away from such delightful and exciting visions to the drudgery of the translator and the commenta- tor. And yet, there were no longings of disap- pointed ambition ; there was now nothing but sad humility and patience, and a mournful longing after God. Most affectingly does he refer to his condition of supposed banishment from the Divine 272 Y E A It X 1 N G S AFTER GOD. favor ; and the mournful grief and desolation of his spirit under it were a precious and convincing proof to others, though not to himself, that God was with him, and that, wake when he might out of this dream of darkness, he should find himself satisfied with God's likeness in a world of light. Cowper's yearnings after God, and his patience and submission to the Divine will, were proofs of the light of life within him, though he felt it not. It is a most blessed promise, " He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, -but shall have the light of life." Cowper always had that, and in the pos- session of it was ripening in holiness and advancing toward heaven, even when he seemed to himself going down to the bottoms of the mountains, in a darkness deeper than Jonah's. " The weeds were wrapped about my head ; the earth with her bars was about me forever ; my soul fainted within me." " God knows," exclaimed Cowper, " how much rather I would be the obscure tenant of a lath-and-plaster cottage, with a lively sense of my interest in a Kedeemer, than the most ad- mired object of public notice without it. Alas ! what is a whole poem, even one of Homer's, com- pared with a single aspiration that finds its way immediately to God, though clothed in ordinary language, or perhaps not articulated at all !" CHAPTER XXII. REMOVAL FROM OLXEY TO AVESTOX. — COMPARISOX OP COWPER'S FEELIXGS AT DIFFERENT PERIODS. — TEXOR OF SOUTITEY's COM- MENTS PPOX COWPER'S EXPERIEXCE AND LETTERS. Cowper's removal from Olney to Weston, a neighboring village much more delightful and agreeable, had taken place, happily, before this new attack. The change was brought about by the friendship and care of Lady Hesketh, who took a house at Weston, on the borders of the pleasure- grounds of Mr. Throckmorton, and belonging to him ; a charming situation, and much more health- ful than their confined, damp, inconvenient habi- tation at Olney. Thither Cowper and the family removed, but they had no sooner become settled for a fortnight, than a most severe affliction was laid upon them in the sudden illness and death of Cowper/s dear friend and long and constant corre- spondent, Mrs. Unwin's beloved son. The an- guish to himself, and the sympathy in Mrs. Un- winds sorrow, occasioned by this bereavement, which took place in November, may have had some effect l!74 KEMU V A L T \V E 8 I N . in hastening the attack of his mental malady, the next January. The visit of Lady Hesketh had been to him a source of great animation and delight. The change of habitation which resulted from it was a lasting benefit. Cowper himself thought that the nervous fever so oppressive to his spirits was much exasperated by the circumstances of his abode at Olney. He speaks of the atmosphere encumbered with raw vapors, issuing from flooded meadows ; " and we in particular/' says he, " per- haps have fared the worse for sitting so often, and sometimes for months, over a cellar filled with water. These ills we shall escape in the uplands, and as we may reasonably hope, of course, their consequences. But as for happiness," says Cowper, " he that has once had communion with his Maker must be more frantic than ever I was yet, if he can dream of finding it at a distance from Him. I no more expect happiness at Weston than here, or than I should expect it in company with felons and out- laws in the hold of a ballast-lighter. Animal spirits, however, have their value, and are especially desirable to him who is condemned to carry a bur- den which at any rate will tire him, but which, without their aid, can not fail to crush him/' " The dealings of God with me are to myself utterly unintelligible. I have never met, either in books or in conversation, with an experience at all similar to my own. More than a twelvemonth has WESTON LODGE. 1 Ht. RESIDENCE OF THE LAJ'i. WILLIAM COWPEB, ESQ Cheevei s Cowpei p. "^7 4 southet's comments. 275 passed since I began to hope that, having walked the whole breadth of the bottom of this Red Sea, I was beginning to climb the opposite shore, and I prepared tossing the song of Moses. But I have been disappointed ; those hopes have been blast- ed ; those comforts have been wrested from me. I could not be so duped, even by the Arch Enemy himself, as to be made to question the divine na- ture of them ; but I have been made to believe (which you will say is being duped still more) that God gave them to me in derision, and took them away in vengeance. Such, however, is and has been my persuasion many a long day, and when I shall think on that subject more comfortably, or, as you will be inclined to tell me, more rationally and scripturally, I know not." Yet it is just about this time that Southey un- dertakes to say, on account of Cowper's enjoyment of the society of Lady Hesketh, and the tone of cheerfulness in his letters, and the absence of any marked religious strain, that Cowper was happier than he had ever been since the days of his youth ! This contains a covert but studied depreciation of the brightness and blessedness of Cowper's life in the happy years of his early experience in Hun- tingdon and Olney, after his conversion. It re- minds us of Southey's declaration that the period when Cowper was so absorbed in religious duties and employments, and enjoyed such close and un- 276 IOUTHBY'8 CO M MR NTS. interrupted communion with his God and Saviour, was "preposterously called the happy period of his life." Southey had also remarked, with a similar concealed reference, that the summer of 1781, when the poet, beneath the cloud of spiritual gloom, was engaged upon his first poetical volume, driven to that work, as he himself Baid, by mental anguish, was the happiest Cowper ever passed. Southey even intimated that the tenor of Cowper's religious life previously, so absorbed in devotional ideas and pursuits, had tended to bring hack his madness, and was one exasperating cause of the access that ensued in 1773. He would persuade the reader that it was a perilous and injudicious thing in Newton to have engaged his friend in such a deeply interesting employment as the com- position of the " Olney Hymns '" and he quotes the two affecting stanzas, " Where is the blessedness I knew,*' " The peaceful hours I once enjoyed, How sweet their memory still 1 But they have left an aching void The world can never fill," as a proof of the supposed danger of a return to madness ! Southey also declared, in reference to Cowper's religious life with Newton, that " the course of life LETTER TO LADY UF.s K E T H . 2 1 i into which Cowper had been led at Olney, tended to alienate him from the friends whom he loved best." In this sentence he referred partly to Lady Hesketh and her family, whose correspondence with Cowper had dropped, apparently because on Cow- per's part it was maintained almost solely on relig- ious subjects. Southey says that the last letter Lady Hesketh received from Cowper, at that time, " was in a strain of that melancholy pietism which casts a gloom over eveiy thing, and which seems at once to chill the intellect and wither the affec- tions." That we may know what it is that Southey can sneer at as a melancholy pietism, and what it is that in his view casts a gloom over hu- man life, and chills the intellect and withers the affections, we shall quote this interesting and ad- mirable letter. It is dated January 30th, 1767, and commences — " My dear Lady Hesketh: " I am glatl you spent your summer in a place so agreeable to you. As to me, my lot is cast in a country where we have neither woods, nor com- mons, nor pleasant prospects ; all is flat and in- sipid ; in the summer adorned only with blue wil- lows, and in the winter covered with a flood. Such it is at present : our bridges shaken almost in pieces ; our poor willows torn away by the roots, and our haycocks almost afloat. Yet even here we '278 LETTER TO LADY HLSKETH. are happy ; at least I am so ; and if I have no groves with benches conveniently disposed, nor commons overgrown with thyme to regale me, neither do I want them. You thought to make my mouth water at the charms of Taplow, but you see you are disappointed. " My dear cousin ! I am a living man ; and I can never reflect that I am so, without recollect- ing at the same time that I have infinite cause of thanksgiving and joy. This makes every place delightful to me where I can have leisure to medi- tate upon those mercies by which I live, and in- dulge a vein of gratitude to that gracious God who has snatched me like a brand out of the burning. Where had I been, but for His forbearance and long-suffering ? — even with those who shall never see His face in hope, to whom the name of Jesus, by a just judgment of God, is become a torment instead of a remedy. Thoughtless and inconsider- ate wretch that I was ! I lived as if I had been my own creator, and could continue my existence to what length and in what state I pleased ; as if dissipation was the narrow way which leads to life, and a neglect of the blessed God would certainly end in the enjoyment of Him. But it pleased the Almighty to convince me of my fatal error before it indeed became such ; to convince me that in communion with Him we may find that happiness for which we were created, and that a life without LETTER TO LADY HESKETH. 279 God in the world is a life of trash, and the most miserable delusion. Oh, how had my own corrup- tions and Satan together blinded and befooled me ! I thought the service of my Maker and Ke- deemer a tedious and unnecessary labor ; I despised those who thought otherwise ; and if they spoke of the love of God, I pronounced them madmen. As if it were possible to serve and love the Al- mighty being too much, with whom we must dwell forever, or be forever miserable without Him. " Would I were the only one that had ever dreamed this dream of folly and wickedness ! but the world is filled with such, who furnish a con- tinual proof of God's almost unprovokable mercy ; who set up for themselves in a spirit of independ- ence upon Him who made them, and yet enjoy that life by His bounty which they abuse to His dishonor. You remember me, my dear cousin, one of this trifling and deluded multitude. Great and grievous afflictions were applied to awaken me out of this deep sleep, and, under the influence of Di- vine grace, have, I trust, produced the effect for which they were intended. If the way in which I had till that time proceeded had been according to the word and will of God, God had never interposed to change it. That He did is certain ; though others may not be so sensible of that interposition, yet I am sure of it. To think as I once did, there- fore, must be wrong. Whether to think as I now n L ; 80 L B T T E B I LAD Y II K B K E T JI . do be right or not, is a question that can only be decided by the Word of God ; at least it is capa- ble of no other decision till the Great Day deter- mine it finally. I see, and see plainly, in every page and period of that Word, rny former heedless- ness and forgetfulness of God condemned. I see a life of union and communion with Him inculcated and enjoined as an essential requisite. To this, therefore, it must be the business of our lives to attain, and happy is he who makes the greatest progress in it. " This js no fable, but it is our life. If we stand at the left hand of Christ while we live, we shall stand there too in the judgment. The sepa- ration must be begun in this world, which in that day shall be made forever. My dear cousin ! may the Son of God, who shall then assign to each his everlasting station, direct and settle all your thoughts upon this important subject. Whether you must think as I do, or not, is not the ques- tion ; but it is indeed an awful question whether the Word of God be the rule of our actions, and his Spirit the principle by which we act. ' Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye believe ye have eternal life.' This letter will be Mr. Howe's com- panion to London. I wish his company were more worthy of him, but it is not fit it should be less. I pray God to bless you, and remember you where southey's comments. 281 I never forget those I love. Yours and Sir Thomas's affectionate friend, Wm. Cowper." If this, in Southey's judgment, be " melancholy pietism," what would be his imagination of sin- cere piety ? It is melancholy to think that his own state of mind was such, that the genuine re- ligion in this letter seemed to him to cover life with gloom, chilling the intellect and withering the affections ! Here, Southey remarks, the cor- respondence with Lady Hesketh appears to have ceased ; " he could take no pleasure at this time in any other strain, and she probably thought that it was dangerous for him to dwell constantly upon this." Southey may have thought so himself, but we would charitably hope that Lady Hesketh did not. At this time Cowper's mind was acting in the clear light of heaven. Some sixteen years afterward the correspondence with Lady Hesketh was renewed ; but Cowper's mind being then un- der the gloom of a religious despair, he could not write upon religious subjects as he had formerly done ; on the contrary, he speaks of his former zeal as having perhaps proved troublesome to her, and assures her that it was no longer his practice to force the subject of evangelical truth upon any. Southey calls this letter a confession of indiscreet zeal, and remarks that it shows what the change in Cowper's own religious views had been, noting 282 RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. with pleasure the altered tone, as giving satisfac- tory evidence of a saner and much more desirable state of mind. Lady Hesketh had written to Cowper, informing him that General Cowper himself was expecting to visit him, and, it would seem, had suggested some hints as to the propriety of avoid- ing any such religious conversation as might, in Southey's expression, occasion any uncomfortable feeling between them. If Lady Hesketh had been aware how changed a being even a Christian must be, at the different poles of hope and despair, she would have had no fear of discomfort from the prevalence of religious and evangelical themes. So profoundly true is the conclusion involved in the prayer of David, " Ke- store unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and up- hold me by Thy free Spirit : then will I teach transgressors Thy ways, and sinners shall be con- verted unto Thee." When Cowper possessed the joy of God's salvation, he could speak upon that theme, and it was the joy and the dictate of his heart to do so ; but he could not do it in gloom, he could not do it unless God opened his lips. " Open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise." In that gloomy and silent state Cowper had now remained so many years, that it is not strange that Ins former freedom and faithfulness began to appear somewhat over-zealous in his own sight. Accordingly he said as much to RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. 283 Lady Hesketh, to take away all her anxiety about his being intrusive on the subject with General Oowper. "As to the affair of religious conversation/' said he, " fear me not lest I should trespass upon his peace in that way. Your views, my dear, upon the subject of a proper conduct in that particular are mine also. When I left St. Albans, I left it under impressions of the existence of a God, and of the truth of Scripture, that I had never felt before. I had un- speakable delight in the discovery, and was impa- tient to communicate a pleasure to others that I found so superior to every thing that bears the name. This eagerness of spirit, natural to persons newly informed, and the less to be wondered at in me, who had just emerged from the horrors of de- spair, made me imprudent, and I doubt not troublesome to many. Forgetting that I had not those blessings at my command, which it is God's peculiar prerogative to impart, spiritual light and affections, I required in effect of all with whom I conversed, that they should see with my eyes ; and stood amazed that the Gospel, which with me was all in all, should meet with opposition, or should occasion disgust in any. But the Gospel could not be the word of God if it did not ; for it foretells its own reception among men, and describes it as exactly such. Good is intended, but harm is done too often by the zeal with which I was at that time 284 RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. animated. But as in affairs of this life, so in re- ligious concerns likewise, experience begets some wisdom in all who are not incapable of being taught. I do not now, neither have I for a long time made it my practice to force the subject of evangelical truth on any. I received it not from man myself, neither can any man receive it from me. God is light, and from Him all light must come ; to His teaching, therefore, I leave those whom I was once so alert to instruct myself. If a man- ask my opinion, or calls for an account of my faith, he shall have it; otherwise I trouble him not. Pulpits for preaching ; and the parlor, the garden, and the walk abroad, for friendly and agreeable conversation." Now we hardly know of a more melancholy let- ter from Cowper in the whole collection of his cor- respondence than this. It could not have been Cowper's deliberate opinion that the heavenly themes of the pulpit are not fit for friendly and and agreeable conversation, nor that the tender, affectionate, and faithful application of such themes may not be made, without any intrusive- ness, in private to the conscience. The tone of a part of this letter painfully resembles that of Southey's own comments. But Cowper, when he wrote thus, had long been dwelling in the mere twilight of a religious gloom, and not in the enjoy- ment of his former sweet religious fervor and hope. IRRELIGIOUS CRITICISMS. 285 From such a disastrous twilight, between the day- light and the darkness, he looked back to his form- er happy, animated, heavenly state of mind, and described it under the false coloring that now fell upon it from the habit of his own despair. But these were not his views in that joyful period when his earnest conversations with his own beloved brother were made so eminently the means of bringing him also to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus ; when his conversation and example shed such light and grace also upon the dear circle in which he moved in Olney, and when he com- posed, those hymns, that have been God's manna to many a smitten soul in the wilderness, and will continue to be sung by the Church of God till time shall be no longer. Accordingly, from Cowper in gloom and darkness, we would appeal to Cowper walking in the light of his Kedeemer's countenance ; nay, we may appeal from Cowper's letter, to the tenor of his own exquisitely devout and beautiful poem on Conversation ; and from the irreligious criticisms of the man of literature merely, we would appeal to the judgment of a mind impressed with the value of the soul, happy in the presence of Christ, and alive to a sense of eternal realities. Cowper's autobiography was written in the un- clouded exercise of his reason, and with all the animated fervor and affection of a grateful heart, enjoying and praising God. The description of IK R E I. I G I O U I CRITICISMS. his experience at Bt Al ban's, in a letter to Lady Hesketh many years afterward, and the review of his ardor, in the letter jnst quoted, were composed beneath the darkness of his long religious gloom. Yet Southey has the hardihood to remark that " the different state of mind in which Cowper described his malady at Olney to Lady Hesketh, from that in which he drew up the dreadful nar- rative of his madness in the Temple, and of his recovery at St. Albans, might induce, if not a be- lief of his perfect restoration, a reasonable hope of it. In the former instance (his conversion) he fully believed that the happy change which had taken place in him was supernatural ; and of this both Mr. Xewton and Mrs. Unwin were so thor- oughly persuaded that many months elapsed after the second attack, violent as the access was, be- fore they could bring themselves to ask Dr. Cot- ton's advice. They thought that the disease the work of the Enemy, and that nothing less than Omnipotence could free him from it. Means they allowed were in general not only lawful but expedient ; but his was a peculiar and exempt case, in which they were convinced that the 1 Jehovah would be alone exalted when the day of deliverance was come. Cowper had now learned t<~> take a saner view of his own condition." It is painful to read such passages. They in- dicate, taken in connection with others, an almost PRESENCE OF THE TEMPTER. 287 malignant hostility against the manifestations of Divine grace, or rather against the belief that such exercises as Cowper passed through are the work of Divine grace in the heart. Southey sneers at the supposition of any thing supernatural in Cow- per' s happy change, and of course much more at the idea of there being any thing subter-neituial, any thing of the workings of " the Enemy/' in his malady. But there are not wanting passages in Cowper's own letters that look as if his mind ivere sometimes engaged in murky encounters with the Prince of Darkness ; and it would be an interesting investigation to trace, in such a case, the evidences of the possible presence and power of such a Tempter. CHAPTER XXIII. COMPARISON OF COWPER'S EARLY SORROWS AND IIIS LATE. — HIS EARLIEST POETRY. — DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SYMPATHETIC AND PERSONAL SUFFERING. — POEM IN THE INSANE ASYLUM COMP WITH THAT IN THE ASYLUM OF GOD'S GRACE. We are approaching now a very sad and gloomy period in Cowper's mental sufferings, when the fiends that had tracked his steps, or brushed past him with their dragon wings, or stood afar off and mocked him, seemed to close with him in a long and dreadful conflict. These terrors were real ; and one need only compare the groans of a wounded spirit wrung out from his soul in these seasons of such painful endurance, with the tones of early sorrow from disappointed love expressed in the verses of his youth, to feel the tremendous differ- ence between any mere earthly disappointment or grief, and the spiritual despair or darkness that separates the soul from God. Yet those early poems to the object of his youthful affections were beautiful, natural, unambitious, presenting plain indications of his genius ; as indeed was the case EARLY POEMS. 289 with the very earliest of his compositions in poet- ical form known to have been preserved and iden- fied ; that admirable fragment written at Bath on finding the heel of a shoe, in 1748, when he had come to the age of seventeen. The characteristics of the future poet of " The Task" are there so plainly developed, that a page cut from that poem itself would not have a more manifest resemblance ; a very singular phenomenon indeed ; the style, the humor, the language, the rhythm, all plainly fore- shadowed, and the identity of manner maintained through the interval (in his case no small time so confused and chaotic) between seventeen and fifty. In one of his letters he speaks of having written ballads at a period as early as the age of fourteen, having received a taste for that form of poetry from his own father, who himself was the author of several pieces. He also tried his hand at some of the Elegies of Tibullus ; but none of those pieces he could afterward remember or recover. In one of his poetical epistles to Miss Theodora Cowper in 1755, there occur the following lines, which seem to have been written in allusion to the re- fusal of her father to grant Iris sanction for their engagement, his reasons for the inflexible determ- ination being first, their degree of relationship, and second, Cowper's own want of fortune for their 13 290 EARLY POEMS. maintenance in a style corresponding to their family circle and rank. Ye who from wealth the ill-grounded title boast To claim whatever beauty charms you most : Ye sons of fortune, who consult alone Her parent's will, regardless of her own ; Know that a love like ours, a generous flame, No wealth can purchase, and no power reclaim. The soul's affection can be only given Free, unextorted, as the grace of heaven. One year before this, Cowper's Epistle to his friend Lloyd speaks of the fierce banditti of his gloomy thoughts led on by spleen ; and beyond question the disappointment in regard to his af- fections, notwithstanding the consolation of know- ing that those affections were returned, inflicted upon him no transitory nor trifling sorrow. In 1759 we trace his easy style in two of the Satires of Horace, In dear Matt Prior's easy jingle, one of them being the humorous description of the journey to Brundusium. In 1762, just before the painful conflict and complication of distresses in regard to his examination for the clerkship, which brought on the first insanity, we have a poem ad- dressed to Miss Macartney, afterward Mrs. G-re- ville, in which occur the following beautiful verses in the most perfect manner of many of his later minor pieces : EARLY POEMS. 291 Tis woven in the world's great plan, And fixed by heaven's decree, That all the true delights of man Should spring from Sympathy. 'Tis nature bids, and while the laws Of nature we retain, Our self-approving bosom draws A pleasure from its pain. Thus grief itself has comforts dear, The sordid never know, And ecstasy attends the tear, When virtue bids it flow. For when it streams from that pure source, No bribes the heart can win To check, or alter from its course, The luxury within. Still may my melting bosom cleave To sufferings not my own, And still the sigh responsive.heave "Where'er is heard a groan. So Pity shall take Virtue's part, Her natural ally, And fashioning my softened heart, Prepare it for the sky. Beautiful stanzas, and the sentiments most gen- erous and true ! And yet, it was not, after all, in this way of discipline, that Cowper's heart was to be thoroughly subdued and purified, and prepared for a better world. The deepest natural sensibili- ties to other's woes may exist, without any sense of one's own guilt and misery, and without tending 292 STANZAS IN THE ASYLUM. to produce such a sense. Nay, the very fact of pity taking virtue's part, may delude and delight the poor ignorant sinful heart in regard to its own state, and make the owner think himself very near heaven, even by nature, needing nothing supernat- ural to bring him there. The being cut out of the olive which is wild by nature, and grafted into the True Olive-tree, is declared by Paul to be a pro- cess contrary to nature, and not merely above na- ture. And it is a process, at least in the first stages of cutting out, attended with much pain and conflict. The very next poem composed by Cowper after that from which the preceding verses are quoted, exhibits him suddenly plunged from that state of quiet in which he could indulge " the luxury of sympathy within," to the bottomless depths of a personal despair and suffering. It was after his first attempt at suicide, and just before his re- moval to St. Albans, that Cowper composed the following wild and terrible monody of self-con- demnation and vengeance. No convicted criminal, he said, ever feared death more, or experienced more horrible dismay of soul, with conscience scar- ing him, and the avenger of blood pursuing him. Hatred and vengeance, my eternnl portion. Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait with impatient readiness to seize my Soul in a moment. MONODY AT ST. ALBANS. 2V3 Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy Master ! Twice betrayed, Jesus, ine the last delinquent, Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me. Hell might afford my miseries a shelter ; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot ! encompassed with a thousand dangers ; "Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I 'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice Sent quick and howling to the center headlong. I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb am Buried above ground. Over this Bridge of Sighs, where the smoke and flame from the gulf of perdition and despair roll and shoot across the pathway, we pass into another experience, as if we were transported from the gates of hell to the threshold, and the company, and the melodies of heaven. The very next efforts of Cow- per's genius, and expression of his feelings, con- veyed the gratitude and joy of his soul in those sacred hymns, for the composition of which these mental sufferings and gloom, and the faith in Christ by which, through the grace of Christ, he emerged from them, were the preparation. The second of them we place here in vivid contrast with the previous stanzas that were darkening with 294 P R A Y E B A N D PRAISE. such lurid fire, to note that even the sorrow and despair which constituted so much of Cowper's ex- perience afterward for many years, breathed rather the spirit of that sweet hymn of gratitude and grace, than the tones of a tortured conscience, without which despair is but a dream ; the spirit of submission instead of the sense of retribution, characterized his gloom. Far from the world. Lord, I flee, From strife and tumult far, From scenes where Satan wages still His most successful war. The calm retreat, the silent shade, "With prayer and praise agree; And seem, by Thy sweet bounty, made For those who follow Thee. There, if Thy Spirit touch the soul And grace her mean abode, Oh. with what peace, and joy, and love, She communes with her God 1 There like the nightingale she pours Her solitary lays : Nor asks a witness of her song, Nor thirsts for human praise. Author and guardian of my life, Sweet source of light divine, And (all harmonious names in one) My Saviour, thou art mine I What thanks I owe Thee, and what love, A boundless, endless store, Shall echo through the realms above, When time shall bo no more. PRAYER AND PRAISE. 295 Now the great superiority of this exquisite ef- fusion over all the previous productions of Cowper, can be traced to but just one cause, the regenera- tion of his being by the grace of his Redeemer, and the baptism of all his faculties in the light of life. And before we pursue the deepening of his mental gloom till finally the sun of his existence itself went down in darkness, we wish to note the infinite difference, upon the mind as well as heart, between the effect of a troubled and despairing state of the conscience, and that of a mere simple destitution of hope, under a hallucination such as Cowper was afflicted with ; the imagination, not that God was angry with him, nor that his sins had not been forgiven, nor that his heart was in rebellion against God, but that God, from some inexplicable necessity in His own attributes, had banished him forever from his presence. Cowper's conscience was not distressed, but was at peace, and could not be otherwise, for his heart was profoundly sub- missive to God's will. And passing strange it was that these two things could exist together, love and despair, submission and the belief of being sen- tenced to eternal perdition ; yet they did, and Cowper exhibited the marvelous phenomenon of a soul enriched with all pious feeling, and exhibiting the results of it in the most exquisite productions of sanctified genius, yet seemingly in the darkness of such despair. But if that despair had been the 296 AN ANGKY CONSCIENCE. fire of an angry conscience, the only exercise of his genius would have been the repetition of those awful strains of Hatred and vengeance, ray eternal portion ! The torture and despair of an angry conscience are realities that no social pleasantry can relieve, nor wit nor affection of sympathizing friends dimin- ish. Nor could any of Cowper's literary occupa- tions have procured him any intervals of forgetful- ness or peace, if the cause of his suffering had been a conscience at war against himself, and a heart against his Maker. But with " the heart sprinkled from an evil conscience," and in humble submis- sion to the will of God, even the delusions of in- sanity sometimes passed before him as a dream, and he could enjoy existence in spite of them. CHAPTER XXIV. HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE. — LETTER TO LADY HESKETH. — PLEASANT DWELLING AT WESTON. — LETTERS TO NEWTON. — CHEERFULNESS. — COWPER'S DIFFERENT VIEWS OF HIS OWN CONDITION. — STYLE OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE. — CARE OF MRS. UNWIN. The tenderest, most affectionate, and pathetic of Cowper's poems were among the last ; as he grew older his heart seemed to grow younger, notwith- standing the weary melancholy that oppressed him. It was not till 1790 that he received the gift of his mother's picture from his cousin Mrs. Bodham, and the letter in which he acknowledged it, is one of the sweetest he ever wrote, as the poem in reference to it was one of the most ex- quisite expressions of his genius. " My dearest Rose, whom I thought withered and fallen from the stalk, but whom I find still alive : nothing could give me greater pleasure than to know it, and to learn it from yourself. I loved you dearly when you were a child, and love you not a jot the less for having ceased to be so. Every creature that bears any affinity to my mother is dear to me. and you, the daughter of her brother, 13* 298 L E I I L k v M I HI Oil 1 are but one remove distant from her ; I love you, therefore, and love you much, both for her sake and for your own. The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me as the picture which you have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it, and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and of course the first on which my eyes open in the morning. She died when I had completed my sixth year, yet I re- member her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a multitude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression. There is in me, I believe, more of the Donne than of the Cowper, and though I love all of both names, and have a thousand reasons to love those of my own name, yet I feel the bond of nature draws me vehemently to your side. I was thought, in the days of my childhood, much to resemble my mother, and in my natural temper, of which, at the age of fifty-eight, I must be supposed a com- petent judge, can trace both her and my late uncle, your father. Somewhat of his irritability, and a little, I would hope, both of his and of her ul' Hid Mo T 11 £ B* 8 PIOTUBS. 299 (I know not what to call it, without seeming to praise myself, which is not my intention, but in speaking to you, I will even speak out, and say) good nature. Add to all this, I deal much in poetry, as did our venerable ancestor, the dean of St. Paul's,* and I think I shall have proved myself a Donne at all points. The truth is, that what- ever I am, I love you all." Cowper wrote also to Mrs. King a few days after the letter to his cousin, referring to the same picture of his mother, and saying : "I remember her perfectly, find the picture a strong likeness of her, and because her memory has been ever pre- cious to me, have written a pcem on the receipt of it ; a poem which, one excepted, I had more pleasure in writing than any that I ever wrote. That one was addressed to a lady whom I expect in a few minutes to come down to breakfast, and who has supplied to me the place of my own mother— my own invaluable mother — these six- and-twenty years. Some sons may be said to have had many fathers, but a plurality of mothers is not common." This latter poem (the Sonnet to Mrs. Unwin), and the lines on his mother's picture, may be perused together ; but only Cowper could under- stand what himself alone had experienced, the * Dr. John Donne, the celebrated diviue and poet, born 1573, died 1631. 300 SONNET TO MARY. similarity and yet the difference between the gush of tender emotion with which he penned the one and the other. The sonnet to Mary is so perfect in its beauty that it could not but be universally admired ; but the lines to the memory of his mother go down as deep into other hearts also, as the love that inspired them in the depths of his own. Mary ! I want a lyre with other strings ; Such aid from Heaven as some have feigned they drew, An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new, And undebased by praise of meaner things ! That ere through age or woe I shed my wings, I may record thy worth with honor due, In verse as musical as thou art true, Verse that immortalizes whom it sings. But thou hast little need ; there is a book, By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light. On which the eyes of God not rarely look, A chronicle of actions just and bright. There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine ; And since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine. The change from this poem to the lines on his mother's picture is manifestly that of deeper feel- ing, though both pieces are from the heart. ON THE RECEIPT OF MY MOTHER'S PICTURE. Oh that those lips had language ! Life has pass'd "With me but roughly since I heard thee last. Those lips are thine — thine own sweet smile I see, The same that oft in childhood solaced me ; Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, " Grieve not. mv child, chase all thy fear." awav V HIS mother's picture. 301 The meek intelligence of those dear eyes (Blest be the art that can immortalize, The art that baffles Time's tyrannic claim To quench it) here shines on me still the same. Faithful remembrancer of one so dear, welcome guest, though unexpected here I Who bidst me honor with an artless song, Affectionate, a mother lost so long. 1 will obey, not willingly alone, But gladly, as the precept were her own : And, while that face renews my filial grief, Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief, Shall steep me in Elysian reverie, A momentary dream, that thou art she. My mother ! when I learn'd that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed ? Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journey just begun ? Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss ; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss — Ah, that maternal smile ! it answers — Yes. I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, And, turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu ! But was it. such? — It was. — Where thou art gone Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting word shall pass my lips no more 1 Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern, Oft gave me promise of thy quick return. What ardently I wish'd, I long believed, And, disappointed still, was still deceived. By expectation every day beguiled, Dupe of to-morrow even from a child. Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went, Till, all my stock of infant sorrows spent, I learn'd at last submission to my lot, But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot. Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more. Children not thine have trod my nursery floor. 30^ ii i b KOTHlB'l ^KTUKJi. And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet-capp'd, 'Tis now become a history little known, That once we call'd the pastoral house our own. Short-lived possession ! but the record fair, That memory keeps of all thy kindness there, Still outlives many a storm, that has effaced A thousand other themes less deeply traced. Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid ; Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, The biscuit, or confectionary plum ; The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestow'd By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed : All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall, Ne'er roughen'd by those cataracts and breaks, That humor interposed too often makes ; All this still legible in memory's page, And still to be so to my latest age, Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay Such honors to thee as my numbers may; Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, Not scorn'd in Heaven, though little noticed here. Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours, "When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I prick'd them into paper with a pin, (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head, and smile); Could those few pleasant days again appear, Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here ? I would not trust my heart — the dear delight Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might. — But no— what here we call our life is such, So little to be loved, and thou so much, That I should ill requite thee to constrain Thy unbound spirit into bonds again. li l B MOTUSB'l P1CTUIE. SUtf Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast (The storms all weather'd and the ocean cross'd) Shoots into port at some well-haven'd isle, Where spices breathe, and brighter seasons smile, There sits quiescent on the floods, that show Her beauteous form reflected clear below, While airs impregnated with incense play Around her, fanning light her streamers gay ; So thou, with sails how swift ! hast reach'd the shore, '•Where tempests never beat nor billows roar;"* And thy loved consort on the dangerous tide Of life long since has anchor'd by thy side. But me, scarce hoping to attain that rest, Always from port withheld, always distress'd — Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-toss'd, Sails ripp'd. seams opening wide, and compass lost, And day by day some current's thwarting force Sets me more distant from a prosperous course. But oh, the thought, that thou art safe, and he 1 That thought is joy, arrive what may to me. My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth ; But higher far my proud pretensions rise — The son of parents pass'd into the skies. And now, farewell — Time unrevoked has run His wonted course, yet what I wish'd is done. By contemplation's help, not sought in vain, I seem to have lived my childhood o'er again ; To have renew'd the joys that once were mine, Without the sin of violating thine ; And, while the wings of fancy still are free, And I can view this mimic show of thee, Time has but half succeeded in his theft — Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left. The unequaled tenderness and pathos of this poem, and the universal experience of the sweet- ness and preciousness of a mothers love, by which * Garth. 304 PROVIDENTIAL MERCY. all hearts answer to its exquisite touches, have rendered it perhaps the best appreciated and ad- mired of all Cowper's productions. The note of his own sorrow is here, as every where, the same, ''scarce hoping to attain that rest,'' to which nevertheless with undeviating constancy of desire his heart was always turned. He might have been answered, in the heantiful language of his own consoling lines to a much afflicted child of God: Ah ! be not sad ! although thy lot be cast Far from the flock, and in a boundless waste ! No shepherd's tents within thy view appear, But the chief Shepherd even there is near ; Thy tender sorrows, and thy plaintive strain, Flow in a foreign land, but not in vain ; Thy tears all issue from a source divine, And every drop bespeaks a Saviour thine ! Writing to Lady Hesketh, with a desire to make every thing in his situation and experience appear as pleasantly to her as he could consci- entiously describe it, Cowper says : " He who hath preserved me hitherto, will still preserve me. All the dangers that I have escaped are so many pillars of remembrance, to which I shall hereafter look back with comfort, and be able, as I well hope, to inscribe on every one of them a grateful memorial of God's singular protection of me. Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I in my heart believe it will PROVIDENTIAL MERCY. 305 be to the end. Wonders I have seen in the great deeps, and wonders I shall see in the paths of mercy also. This, my dear, is my creed." But this is neither the creed nor the language, and these are not the feelings, either of hopeless- ness or despair, but of faith, and hope, and ador- ing gratitude and love. And while Cowper could write thus, he was gaining, by grace, a transitory victory, full of promise, although so transitory, over the soul's great Enemy, and his own habitual gloom. It was by one of the paths of mercy in the Divine Providence that Cowper was led to change the place of his residence from Olney to Weston. This removal to a new and delightful abode was accomplished in 1786 through Lady Hesketh's affectionate perseverance and energy. The house at Olney had been always unfavorable to the health of its inmates. Cowper speaks of having been confined for years by the combination of locality and climate, from September to March, and sometimes longer. Besides the raw vapors issuing from flooded meadows, and the sitting- room, sometimes for months, over a cellar filled with water Cowper said also that a gravel walk, thirty yards long, was all the open space he had to move in for eight months in the year, during thirteen years of such imprisonment. Their walks and space for exercise from April 300 EXQUISITE PICTURE. to August were, however, delightful, and so was Cowper's own workshop, as he called it, in the garden. Take, for example, the following ex- quisite picture. "I am writing in it now. It is the place in which I fabricate all my verse in summer time. The grass under my windows is all bespangled with dew-drops, and the birds are singing in the apple-trees among the blossoms. Never poet had a more commodious oratory in which to invoke his muse. u We took our customary walk yesterday in the wilderness at Weston, and saw with regret the laburnums, syringas, and guelder-roses, some of them blown, and others just upon the point of blowing, and could not help observing, ' all these will be gone before Lady Hesketh comes !' Still, however, there will be roses, and jasmine, and honey- suckle, and shady walks, and cool alcoves, and you will partake of them with us. But I want you to have a share of every thing that is delightful here, and can not bear that the advance of the season should steal away a single pleasure before you can come to enjoy it." Mr. Unwin was shocked when he first saw the house in which his mother and Cowper dwelt so long in Olney. It looked to him like a prison, and Cowper told him afterward that his view of it was not only just but prophetic. Nevertheless, some very happy years were spent there, and the A JUST DELIVERY. 307 quiet and sweetness, the refinement, purity, and piety of the domestic circle threw around it an air of beauty. When they first thought of the resi- dence at Weston, then the discomforts of the house at Olney came suddenly into view. Cowper told Mr. Unwin that " it not only had the aspect of a place built for the purpose of incarceration, but had actually served that purpose through a long, long period, and they had been the prisoners. But a jail-delivery is at hand. The bolts and bars are to be loosed, and we shall escape. Both your mother's constitution and mine have suffered materially by such close and long confinement, and it is high time, unless we intend to retreat into the grave, that we should seek out a more wholesome residence." He told Mr. Newton, on the same occasion, that "a fever of the slow-and- spirit-oppressing kind seemed to belong to all, ex- cept the natives, who had dwelt in Olney many years ;" and he thought that both Mrs. Unwin and himself owed their respective maladies to the local causes that have been enumerated. In thus speaking, Cowper did not refer to the burden of his despair, which he never attributed to physical disease, however much he might be willing to admit that it was exasperated by his nervous fevers. Neither the physical nor the mental derangement were produced by the marshes of Olney, for both had been developed in his system 308 EARLIEST DEJECTION. as early as his residence at London in the Temple. There, at the age of twenty-one, in 1752, he was " struck with such a dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same, can have the least conception of. Day and night," he says, " I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair. I presently lost all relish for those studies to which I had before been closely attached ; the classics had no longer any charms for me ; I had need of something more salutary than amusement, but I had no one to direct me where to find it." It was after his removal to Weston that the third attack of his mental malady occurred ; and the recovery from it (as has been noted) was as sudden as the attack. In reviewing it, he spoke of " those jarrings that made his skull feel like a broken egg-shell." There were causes both of physical and mental disease in his system, which would doubtless have been developed, had his residence from the outset been in Weston, or any other part of the kingdom, during the whole twenty-five years since his departure from St. Albans ; but they might have been much re- pressed and modified, and perhaps at length nearly removed or conquered, had his manner of life been more active, and his home more favorable to health. But neither physical nervous derange- ment, nor local miasma aggravating its power, SPIRITUAL ADVERSARIES. 809 nor mistakes in the manner of its treatment, can prove that there were no assaults from malignant spiritual adversaries. It is declared by divine in- spiration to be the work of the god of this world to blind the minds of those that believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ should be received by them. It may be equally his work to produce delusion in the minds of those that be- lieve, if he can by that means turn them astray, or diminish or destroy their usefulness. But Cow- per was in the hands of God, not Satan, and thus far the Tempter might go, and no further than just to reveal the more brightly the wonderful grace of God. A thread of divine providence, Cowper was wont to say, ran through his whole life, and he could trace divine interposition in every part of it ; but he felt that he could also trace the malignant interference of opposing pow- ers. Who can say that he and Newton were mis- taken ? Some of Cowper's letters to Mrs. King contain interesting and illustrative references to his own case, and his own opinion in regard to it. He told her that he was a strange creature, with singulari- ties that would fill her with wonder if she knew them. " I will add, however," says he, "injust- ice to myself, that they would not lower me in your good opinion ; though perhaps they might tempt you to question the soundness of my upper 310 [ JT T I R G I ISOBT PRAYER. story. Almost twenty years have I been thus unhappily circumstanced ; and the remedy is in the hand of God only/' He then says that all this uuhappiness may vanish in a moment, and if it please God it shall. "In the mean time, my dear madam, remember me in your prayers, and mention me at those times as one whom it has pleased God to afflict with singular visitations/' This was in 1790, and at this time he not only besought the prayers of dear Christian friends for himself in his affliction, but was in the habit of commending them also to God in like manner at the throne of grace, when he heard of their dis- tresses. This is evident from a letter to Newton on the declining health of his wife. Cowper closes it, " commending you and Mrs. Newton, with all the little power I have of that sort, to His fatherly and tender care in whom you have both believed, in which friendly office I am fervently joined by Mrs. Unwin." In this same letter he says : " Twice, as you know, I have been overwhelmed with the blackest despair ; and at those times every thing on which I have been at any period of my life concerned, has afforded to the Enemy a handle against me. I tremble, therefore, almost at every step I take, lest on some future similar occasion it should yield him opportunity, and furnish him with means to torment me." He said this, in reference to the SINCERITY OF MIND. 811 question of resorting to magnetism, which had been proposed by Newton, as an experiment which it might be well to try in Cowper's case ; but he had " a thousand doubts/' and it was not thought best to attempt it. "I could not sing the Lord's song," said Cow- per, "were it to save my life, banished as I am, not to a strange land, but to a remoteness from His presence, in comparison with which the dis- tance from east to west is no distance, is vicinity and cohesion. I dare not, either in prose or verse, allow myself to express a frame of mind which I am conscious does not belong to me ; least of all can I venture to use the language of absolute res- ignation, lest, only counterfeiting, I should, for that very reason, be taken strictly at my word, and lose all my remaining comfort." This was written in 1788 to his friend, Mr. Bull, in answer to a request for some hymns from Cowper, or a proposition that he would employ his powers again in that kind of composition. " Ask possi- bilities, and they shall be performed," said Cow- per ; "but ask not hymns from a man suffering from despair as I do." But when Cowper speaks of his remaining comfort, it is plain that he is not, and does not regard himself as being, a prey to absolute despair. He has some comfort, and is fearful of any step that might deprive him of it. It was only two years and a half before this date 312 TERROR OF JANUARY. that Cowper began the renewal of his correspond- ence with Lady Hesketh. Cowper lived in terror of the month of January, because it was the season in which he had been twice prostrated by the dreadful mental malady which had covered his life with gloom. He ad- vanced toward the month, he told Newton, with a dread not to be imagined. He said he knew better than to be mastered by such terrors, for he knew that both he and the months were in the hand of God, and that one month was as danger- ous as another, unless guarded by Him, whether in midsummer, at noonday, and in the clear sun- shine, or at midnight and in midwinter ; but he could not help it, could not avail himself of his knowledge. " I have heard of bodily aches and ails that have been particularly troublesome when the season returned in which the hurt that occa- sioned them was received. The mind, I believe (with my own, however, I am sure it is so), is liable to similar periodical affections." When the dreaded month was past, he was " thankful to the Sovereign Dispenser both of health and sickness, who, though he had had such cause to tremble, gave him encouragement to hope that he might dismiss his fears." In the intervals, and in the anticipation of an event to which he looked forward with delight, euch as the visit from his beloved cousin Lady TEARS AND HOPES. 813 Hesketh, he could give a most cheerful, and, on the whole, a most sincerely cheerful description of himself. Then again it was a mixture of de- spondency and hope. " My health and spirits seem to be mending daily. To what end I know not, neither will conjecture, but endeavor, so far as I can, to be content that they do so. * * * But years will have their course and their effects ; they are happiest, so far as this life is concerned, who do not grow old before their time. Trouble and anguish do that for some which only longevity does for others. A few months since I was older than your father is now, and though I have lately recovered, as FalstafT says, some smatch of my youth, I have but little confidence, in truth, none, in so flattering a change, but expect, when I least expect it, to wither again/' His repeated experience of sudden attacks and as sudden restorations induced him at length to conclude that this was the appointed and peculiar style of God's providence in regard to him, and that it would last to the end ; and, moreover, that he might be restored to perfect light and peace and blessedness at a moment when he least ex- pected it. All this was realized ; but the end, not till he entered on the glory of a better world. The infinite amazement and ecstasy of his spirit, when released from its prison, and, in the language of FsLu\,foimd in Christ, at his appearing and in 14* 314 STYLE OF PROVIDENCE. his kingdom, can be thought upon in silence, but not shadowed forth in words. It was only an ex- ercise of power and grace by the Lord of Life and Glory, greater than in the case of Lazarus, that could say, Loose him, and let him go ! "There is," says Cowper, "a certain style of dispensations maintained by Providence in the dealings of God with every man, which, however the incidents of his life may vary, and though he may be thrown into many different situations, is never exchanged for another. The style of dis- pensation peculiar to myself has hitherto been that of sudden, violent, unlooked-for change. When I have thought myself falling into the abyss, I have been caught up again ; when I have thought myself on the threshold of a happy eter- nity, I have been thrust down to hell. The rough and the smooth of such a lot, taken to- gether, should perhaps have taught me never to despair ; but through an unhappy propensity in my nature to forbode the worst, they have on the contrary operated as an admonition to me never to hope. A firm persuasion that I can never durably enjoy a comfortable state of mind, but must be depressed in proportion as I have been elevated, withers my joys in the bud, and in a manner en- tombs them before they are born, for I have no expectation but of sad vicissitude, and ever believe that the last shock of all will be fatal." LETTERS TO NEWTON. 315 This was to Newton, in 1788, just after Cowper had enjoyed a visit from that dear and experienced friend, who knew his sorrows better than any other man living. Cowper had found those comforts, which had formerly sweetened all their interviews, in part restored. He knew him, he said, for the same shepherd who was sent to lead him out of the wilderness into the pasture where the chief Shepherd feeds His flock, and felt his sentiments of affectionate friendship for him the same as ever. But one thing, he said, was wanting, and that thing the crown of all ; referring to a per- sonal assurance of redemption in Christ. " I shall find it in God's time, if it he not lost forever. When I say this, I say it trembling ; for at what time soever comfort shall come, it will not come without its attendant evil." Two years later, in October, 1790, in a very beautiful letter to the same dear friend, Cowper speaks of the sense one has, in a rural situation, of the rapidity with which time flies. The show- ers of Autumn leaves were falling from the trees around him, and reminded him of the shortness of his existence here. There was a time, he says, when he thought of this with pleasure, and even " numbered the seasons as they passed in swift rotation, as a school-boy numbers the days that interpose between the next vacation, when he shall see his parents and enjoy his home." But 316 LETTERS TO NEWTON. under the long continuance and deepening of his religious gloom, the absence of all hope, and the prevalence of the imaginary assurance that lie was to be banished from God forever, had made him look upon the shortness and the close of life with regret, though the consideration was once so grate- ful to hiin. He says he had become such another wretch as Maecenas was, who wished for long life, he cared not at what expense of sufferings. * ; The only consolation left me on this subject is, that the voice of the Almighty can in one mo- ment cure me of this mental infirmity. That He can. I know by experience ; and there are reas for which I ought to believe that He will. But from hope to despair is a transition that I have made so often that I can only consider the hope that may come, and that sometimes I believe will, as a short prelude of joy to a miserable conclusion of sorrow that shall never end. Thus are my brightest prospects clouded, and thus to me is hope itself become like a icitliered floicer tiiat has lost both its hue and its fragrance." The language and the imagery m these extracts are very affecting ; yet the whole passages are proofs of what we have intimated, that Cowper's despair was not at any time absolute, but in gen- eral a singular and trembling mixture of fear and hope, so that he could seriously and soberly speak of the gloom as a mental infirmity, which God. LETTERS TO N IS W TON. 317 could dissipate, and of the idea of his certain per- dition as a notion, which the Redeemer could dis- possess from his mind at any moment. If his hope was like a withered flower, still he kept it as one treasures up a flower given by a very dear friend between the leaves of a very precious book, and though the flower is dry, yet the heart that loves the giver is not, but retains the same affec- tion and esteem as ever. For even so did Cowper love and adore an unseen Saviour, and this de- lightful fact was sometimes singularly asserted in his dreams, when he would not have admitted it in his hours of wakeful despondency ; as in that instance to which we shall have occasion to refer, when he found himself exclaiming, "I love Thee, even now, more than many who see Thee daily !" In connection with these letters to Newton in regard to his visit, how beautiful are the stanzas of poetry in which Cowper had sent him an invi- tation in the Spring. The piece closes with these three verses : Old Winter, halting o'er the mead, Bids rue and Mary rnourn; But lovely Spring peeps o'er his head, And whispers your return. Then April, with her sister May, Shall chase him from the bowers, And weave fresh garlands every day, To crown the smiling hours. 318 LETTERS TO NEWTON. And if a tear that speaks regret Of happier times appear, A glimpse of joy that we have met Shall shine, and dry the tear. These letters are still more striking, from the fact that even while writing them, Cowper was in the enjoyment of good health, and at the date of the last more than usually happy and cheerful in the family circle, Lady Hesketh being at that time a member of it. Cowper apologizes for the " dis- mal strain" in which he has written, and then says : " Adieu, my dear friend. We are well ; and notwithstanding all that I have said, I am myself as cheerful as usual. Lady Hesketh is here, and in her company even I, except now and then for a moment, forget my sorrows." Certainly it can not be the gloom of despair, when the presence of a beloved friend can so effect- ually dispel the sorrow as to make it forgotten for days together, except now and then for a moment. Cowper had acquired, in the long comparative loneliness of his state, the habit of brooding over his gloom, and if a cheerful, affectionate, and happy spirit like Lady Hesketh's could always have been with him, and especially, to separate him from the charge of a perpetual anxious watchfulness over the declining health and faculties of his dear Mary, the result would have been very different. His mind and heart were in no condition to endure DARKENING HOURS. 319 " the dreadful post of observation darkening every hour ;" and it was a terrible complication of in- ward gloom and images of despair, with such a re- ality of external distress answering to them, when the deplorable condition of his dearest friend came to be the subject of incessant care and con- templation. CHAPTER XXV. THE YEAR 1791. — FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN HAYLEY AND COWPER. — HAYLEY'S VISIT TO WESTON. AND COWPERS TO EARTHAM. — ILL- NESS OF MRS. UNWIN. ENGAGEMENT ON MILTON. In 1791 the interesting friendship between Hay- ley and Cowper commenced, with a frequent and affectionate correspondence by letter. Hayley then visited Cowper at Weston, and during the month of his visit, was enabled to calm and comfort his friend beneath the shock which *the whole family sustained in an attack of paralysis with which Mrs. Unwin was most suddenly and unexpectedly afflicted. Electricity was found to be a successful remedy, and she gradually recovered, though very feeble still when Hayley left them. At this time Hayley was forty-seven years of age, Cowper sixty-one, and Mrs. Unwin nearly seventy. But from this period Cowper's mental malady seems to deepen and darken, while the intervals of relief and cheerfulness grow more infrequent and tran- sient. His visit to Hayley at Eartham was a season of partial enjoyment, but Mrs. Unwin's in- HARASSING NIGHT VISIONS. 321 creasing illness was a cause of deep dejection and of ceaseless care. The gloom and distress of Cow- per's mind were sometimes insupportable. Despair seemed not only to have involved his heart, but threatened even a paralysis of his intellect. The dread delusion that his soul had been rejected of God still adhered to him, after his recovery from the attack in 1787, and his system was more than ever subject to nervous fever and disturb- ance. In his sleep he was racked with distressing dreams, and scared with visions, so that his nights were dreadful. " Distressed and full of despair, the day hardly ever comes in which I do not utter a wish that I had never been born. And the night is become so habitually a season of dread to me that I never lie clown on my bed with comfort, and am in this respect a greater sufferer than Job, who, concerning his hours of rest, could hope at least, though he was disappointed ; but in my case, to go to sleep is to throw myself into the mouth of my enemy/' In another letter he says, " I wake almost con- stantly under the influence of a nervous fever, by which my spirits are affected to such a degree that the oppression is almost insupportable. Since I wrote last, I have been plunged in deeps unvis- ited, I am convinced, by any human soul but mine ; and though the day in its progress bears awav with it some part of this melancholy, I am 14* 322 c o y t in ubd lurrisi s g . never cheerful, because I can never hope, and am 60 bounded in my prospects that to look forward to another year to me seems madness." Mrs. Un- win. too. was in a deplorable condition, which itself overtasked Cowper's sympathy and care. Her paralytic illnesses were gradually rendering her own mind gloomy and helpless, so that the combination of distresses in their condition was deplorably af- fecting. " Like myself,'' wrote Cowper, " she is dejected ; dejected both on my account and on her own. Unable to amuse herself either with work or reading, she looks forward to a new dav with despondence, weary of it before it begins, and lono-inor for the return of night. Thus it is with us both. If I endeavor to pray. I get my answer in a double portion of misery. My petitions, there- fore, are reduced to three words, and those not very often repeated, ' God have mercy/ ,; This situation was so gloomily and deplorably painful, that, as Cowper hiinself said, it seemed mi- raculous in his own eyes, that always occupied as he was in the contemplation of the most distressing subjects, he was not absolutely incapacitated for the common offices of life. " My purpose/' said he, " is to continue such prayer as I can make, although with all this reason to conclude that it is not accepted, and though I have been more than once forbidden, in my own apprehension, by Him to whom it is addressed." At another time he IMPKEbSlONS I M DREAMS. 323 says, " Neither waking nor sleeping have I any communications from God, but am perfectly a withered tree, fruitless and leafless. A conscious- ness that He exists, that once He favored me, but that I have offended to the forfeiture of all such mercies, is ever present with me ; and of such thoughts consist the whole of my religious expe- riences." Again, " I feel in the mean time every thing that denotes a man an outcast and a reprobate. I dream in the night that God has rejected me finally, and that all promises and all answers to prayers made for me are mere delusions. I wake under a strong and clear conviction that these communications are from God, and in the course of the day nothing occurs to invalidate that per- suasion. As I have said before, there is a mystery in this matter that I am not able to explain. I believe myself the only instance of a man to whom God will promise every thing, and perform noth- ing." This impression was connected with a voice which he thought he heard in the year 1786, before the dreadful access of delirium in 178T ; and which his diseased imagination interpreted as the voice of God, " I will promise you any thing." Meanwhile, Cowper had undertaken the labor of a new edition of Milton with notes, the respon- sibility of which, the more clearly he saw the im- possibility of accomplishing it, was as a dark 3l!4 DISTRESSING L> R i; A M 8. mountain before him. He was also laboriously at work in another revision of his translation of Homer ; and his hours of labor were so imprudently arranged, that this alone must have been a great exasperating cause of his depression. Notwith- standing his miseries by night, and his sufferings on' waking — "I wake always," said he, ''under a terrible impression of the wrath of God, and for the most part with words that fill me with alarm, and with the dread of woes to come" — notwith- standing this, he rose every morning at six, and worked incessantly and laboriously upon Homer till near eleven, before breakfasting ! Some four hours of exhausting task-work, daily, in this cruel manner, so fatigued both body and mind as to ren- der him utterly incapable of any other labor. This course was pursued at this time, in order that he might have the whole day, after Mrs. Unwin rose, to devote uninterrupted to the care of that dear invalid ; but it was exhausting and depressing in the highest degree. What he sometimes endured at night, as well as by day, may be judged from some of his letters. " From four this morning till after seven I lay meditating terrors, such terrors as no language can express, and as no heart, I am sure, but mine ever knew. My very finger-ends tingled with it, as in- deed they often do. I then slept and dreamed a long dream, in which I argued with many tears SINGULARLY VIVID D it £ A M . 325 that my salvation is impossible. I recapitulated, in the most impassioned accent and manner, the unexampled severity of God's dealings with me in the course of the last twenty years, especially in the year 1773, and again in 1786, and concluded all with observing that I must infallibly perish, and that the Scriptures which speak of the insufficiency of man to save himself can never be understood unless I perish/' Again he says, ''I was visited with a horrible dream, in which I seemed to be taking a final leave of my dwelling, and every ob- ject with which I have been most familiar, on the evening before my execution. I felt the tenderest regret at the separation, and looked about for something durable to carry with me as a memorial. The iron hasp of the garden-door presenting itself, I was on the point of taking that ; but recollecting that the heat of the fire in which I was. going to be tormented would fuse the metal, and that it would therefore only serve to increase my insup- portable misery, I left it. I then awoke in all the hoiTor with which the reality of such circumstances would fill me." In one of his letters to Lady Hesketh, speaking of his continued labors upon Homer, Cowper says, and truly says : " Had Pope been subject to the same alarming speculations, had he, waking and sleeping, dreamed as I do, I am inclined to think he would not have been my predecessor in those 326 REASONINGS OF IH1 INSANE. labors ; for I compliment myself with a persuasion that I have more heroic valor, of the passive kind at least, than he had, perhaps than any man ; it would be strange had I not, after so much ex- ercise." The trains of Cowper's reasoning in his dreams may some of them be curiously and instructively compared with illustrations of a waking insanity ; as, for example, in the instance of George the Third, who once addressed himself to two persons long dead under the idea that they were living and in his presence. " Your Majesty forgets/' said Sir Henry Halford, " that they both died many years ago." " True," replied His Majesty, " died to you and to the world in general, but not to me. You, Sir Henry, are forgetting that I have the power of holding intercourse with those whom you call dead. Yes, Sir Henry Halford, it is in vain, so far as I am concerned, that you kill your patients. Yes, Dr. Baillie ; but— Baillie, Baillie ?— I don't know. Baillie is an anatomist ; he dissects his patients ; and then it would not be a resuscitation merely, but a re-creation ; and that, I think, is beyond my power." In the year 1787, just before the sudden and terrible attack of his malady, which was the third, Cowper had complained to Lady Hesketh of his nervous fever rendering his nights almost sleepless during a whole week. Then the fever left him en- OPINIONS ON DREAMS. 827 tirely, and he slept quietly, soundly, and long. Then, most unexpectedly, ensued the dreaded crisis, and Cowper's mind seemed instantly to have plunged plumb down ten thousand fathom deep into depths that he fully believed no other human being had ever sounded. The prostration contin- ued for months, and the whole period, as to em- ployment and social intercourse, was a vacuum, but not as to consciousness, though he never put on record a single detail of his profoundly distressing experience. But in that letter to Lady Hesketh which pre- ceded this attack he had been led by a reference, to Mrs. Carter's opinions on the subject of dreams, to speak of his own, which, though he said with truth that he was free from superstition, he be- lieved were sometimes prophetic. Mrs. Carter, he said, had had no extraordinary dreams, "and therefore accounted them only the ordinary opera- tions of the fancy. Mine are of a texture that will not suffer me to ascribe them to so inadequate a cause, or to any cause but the operation of an exterior agency. I have a mind, my dear (and to you I w T ill venture to boast of it), as free from superstitition as any man living, neither do I give heed to dreams in general as predictive, though particular dreams I believe to be so." The time had been when the burden of Cow- per's distress was felt in gloom and apprehension '&2$ OPINIONS ON h K E A M 3 . mainly in the day-time, but often in his dreams he had intervals of peace and joy, and renewed that blissful communion with God, of which his hymn entitled " Retirement" presents so exquisitely beautiful a description. At a later period there came a darker change, and day and night were but a variation of the same portentous clouds and im- ages of woe. The reasoning in the dream concern- ing the iron hasp of the gate is exactly an instance of the manner in which an ordinary and confirmed lunatic will reason from his insane premises while wide awake. But this was not the type of Cow- per's insanity, for his mind was under complete control in the day time, and he was infinitely more sane in his dreadful depression and despair, in consequence of believing that he was cut off ever from the happiness of salvation, than any of his careless but affectionate friends were (for such he had) in their confidence and freedom from anxiety. If, as Southey has falsely said, Cowper's malady ''had been what is termed religious mad- ness," theirs was the worst madness of having no religion at all, the malady of an insane heedless- ness about both its anxieties and its hopes. Dreams which by such minds would be scoffed at as the bugbears of superstition, would fill a heart that was truly anxious on the subject ox an eter- nal state with trembling and astonishment. Such dreams might be, like the Gospel itself to men's PRAYERFUL SYMPATHY. 329 waking vision, the means of thoughtfulness and grace to the one class, and of contempt and perdi- tion to the other. Once in a while his dreams were brighter. " I dreamed about four nights ago that, walking I know not where, I suddenly found my thoughts drawn toward God, when I looked upward and exclaimed, ' I love Thee even now more than many who see Thee daily/ " How affectingly true in regard to the reality was this exclamation, though uttered in a dream, and though the afflicted rea- son of Cowper would not have dared to utter it waking ! The notes of his misery were given in greatest fullness to his neighbor and Christian friend, Mr. Teedon, the schoolmaster at Olney, from whose pa- pers it was that such revelations were at length pre- sented of what Cowper really suffered. Mr. Newton regarded Mr. Teedon with friendly esteem, although Southey intimates that if Newton had been there on the ground, or if Mr. Unwin had been living, and known what was going on, they would have interposed, the one on behalf of the afflicted poet, the other on behalf of Mrs. Unwin, to prevent them from having any resort to Mr. Teedon's sympathy and prayers. Mrs. Unwin had been wont to com- mend their suffering friend to Mr. Teedon's sup- plications, that God would in mercy break away the dreadful gloom of his despondency, and restore 380 GLIMPSES OF COMFORT. to him the light of His countenance. Cowper him- self was for a season comforted by his earnest prayers, and was accustomed to tell him, as in a sort of diary, the spiritual terrors he was passing through. But Southey treats these communications be- tween the poet and his humble Christian friend with scorn, and endeavors to hold up the school- master to utter derision, as a contemptible mixture of the fool and fanatic, who presumptuously dared to suppose that he could pray for a being so su- perior to him in intellect as Cowper, and that God would give him such answers as might comfort the suffering heart in prison, and unable to pray for itself. Southey derides this man's prayers, and Cowper's application for them, as if they and it were pitiable and ridiculous to the last degree. He seems indignant that Cowper should have been a party to such spiritual consultations and efforts. Yet it was to Mr. Teedon's affectionate arguments, persuasions, and encouragements that Cowper yielded so far as to resume his own interrupted ap- proaches to the throne of grace ; and when noth- ing on earth could minister to him one ray of com- fort, he was enabled to glean some hope in the assured earnestness and constancy of this Christian friend's petitions for him at the mercy-seat. But Southey seems filled with anger at the very thought of comfort so administered ; it seems as if he re- GLIMPSES OF LIGHT. 331 gaided it as the last possible humiliation of lunacy that Cowper should permit a poor, lowly school- master at Olney, to pray for him and consult with him. In truth, the brightest gleams of comfort in this dark, declining period of his life, and the only intervals of hope, were enjoyed by Cowper through the instrumentality of this despised Christian. These records of what Southey calls pitiable consultations, treating them with most unfeeling contempt, are among the most affecting demon- strations both of Cowper's sufferings and of his genuine piety. They are no proof of superstition, but of confidence in j)rayer, unbroken even to the last, and confidence in God as the hearer of prayer. They convey, too, such manifestations of the affec- tionate gratitude of Cowper to the humble indi- vidual whom he regarded as instrumental of any spiritual blessing to him, or any alleviation of his distress, that there is more of pleasure than of painfulness, in this view, in their perusal. Cow- per's first letter from Hayley's house at Eartham, in this distressing year, was written to Mr. Teedon, (which Southey notes as in itself a great humilia- tion), and it contains the following sweet passage : " I had one glimpse — at least I was willing to hope it was a glimpse — of heavenly light by the way ; an answer, I suppose, to many fervent prayers of yours. Continue to pray for us, and P E It S E V E R A N C I I B P RATER. when any thing occurs worth communicating, let oa know it. Mia Unwin is in charming spirits, to which the incomparable air and delightful scenes of Eartham have much contributed. But our thanks are always due to the Giver of all good for these and all His benefits ; for without His blessing, Paradise itself would not cheer the soul that knows Him." It is remarkable that the wanderings of Cow- per's mind in the chaos of dreams, though contin- ually pervaded by the same terror as by day, were mingled with intervals of celestial light and com- fort. He was not always scared with visions, nor barred all access to the mercy-seat, but as if the soul had escaped for a season from its prison, and was soaring at liberty, he enjoyed heartfelt com- munion with God. And the following paragraphs in some of his notes to Mr. Teedon show that one beneficial effect was produced by Mr. Teedon's prayerful efforts and affectionate counsels and en- treaties, which the whole world of the wise and the literary could not have effected ; they persuaded Cowper to persevere in prayer : " I have now persevered in the punctual per- formance of the duty'of prayer. My purpose is to continue such prayer as I can make, although with all this reason to conclude that it is not ac- cepted, and though I have been more than once forbidden, in my own apprehension, by Him to GODS PRESENCE. 333 whom it is addressed. You will tell me that God never forbids any body to pray, but, on the con- trary, encourages all to do it. I answer — Xo. Some he does not encourage, and some he even forbids ; not by words, perhaps, but by a secret negative found only in their experience. " Since I wrote last, my nights have been less infected with horrid dreams and wakings, and I would willingly hope that it is in answer to the prayers I offer ; lifeless as they are, I shall not dis- continue the practice, you may be sure, so long as I have even this encouragement to observe it. " Two or three nights since I dreamed that I had God's presence largely, and seemed to pray with much liberty. I then proceeded dreaming about many other things, all vain and foolish ; but at last I dreamed that recollecting my pleas- ant dream, I congratulated myself on the exact recollection that I had of my prayer, and of all that passed in it. But when I waked, not a sin- gle word could I remember ; the single circum- stance that my heart had been enlarged was all that remained with me." To Newton he wrote as follows : " Prayer I know is made for me, and sometimes with great enlargement of heart by those who offer it ; and in this circumstance consists the only evidence I can find that God is still favorably mindful of me, and has not cast me off forever." This 334 JOHNSON'S D I A 1C Y . gleam of consolation was derived wholly from the freedom of his communications with Mr. Teedon, called by Southey a dangerous superstition, and regarded as a mortifying proof of his insanity. It is singularly interesting to compare and contrast these records of Cowper's conflicts, and of a fellow-christian's sympathizing efforts for him in prayer, and his own earnest desires and hopes that God might answer such prayer, though he himself seemed by solitary edict excluded from all hopeful approach to God as his Heavenly Father, with the records of really pitiable and humiliating superstition in Dr. Johnson's Diary. These were remarked upon by Cowper himself in one of his letters to Newton in 1785, but Southey has not one word to utter in regard to the danger to be apprehended from such superstitions, while he sees in Cowper's anxiety for the prayers of a christian friend, and in that friend's belief that such prayers are answered, nothing but proof of egregious self-conceit and vanity on one side, and a mind half insane on the other. Cowper speaks of the publisher of Johnson's Diary as being " neither much a friend to the cause of religion, nor to the author's memory ; for by the specimen of it that has reached us, it seems to contain only such stuff as has a direct tendency to expose both to ridicule. His prayers for the dead, and his minute account of the illc^t with which be ob- JOHNSON'S DIARY. 335 served church fasts, whether he drank tea or coffee, whether with sugar or without, and whether one or two dishes of either, are the most important items to be found in the childish register of the great Johnson, supreme dictator in the chair of literature, and almost a driveler in his closet ; a melancholy witness to testify how much of the wisdom of this world may consist with almost infantine ignorance of the affairs of a better." The record in Johnson's Diary is that of de- plorable superstition and Romish bondage unto fear, arising from the want of an intelligent ap- prehension of the method of redemption in Christ, and a heartfelt reliance upon his atoning mercy for justification. But the record in Cowper's his- tory, and in the broken series of notes between him and Mr. Teedon, is of a mind fully awake both to the terrors of hell and the glories of re- demption, and also perfectly acquainted with God's method of acceptance and of pardon, and per- fectly submissive to that method, and relying only on that ; a mind also encompassed with spiritual terrors, and burdened with despair, but at the same time confident in God's readiness to hear and answer prayer, and expecting relief, grace, and deliverance in no other way ; not by observing church fasts, or drinking tea without sugar, or setting always the left foot first across the thresh- old, but by faith in the Lord Jesus, and prayer in u3(j C ' U W P E R ' I CONFLICT. His all-prevailing name as our Advocate with God. It is a picture of the dreadful conflict of a mind "plunged in deeps/' as Cowper thought, " unvisited by any other human soul ;" a child of God, harassed with the belief that for a special and peculiar reason God would not hear his own prayers, and sometimes forbade him to pray, turn- ing for help and hope to the intercessions of a fellow Christian, acquainted with that conflict, and filled with sympathizing grief on account of it, and to whom Cowper believed, and had reason to believe, that God granted daily enjoyment in prayer, daily and sweet access to the throne of grace. Now in all this Cowper certainly had both Apostlic examples and injunctions to guide him, and the instructions of Divine Inspiration to sanction his course. Paul never intimates that it is egregious conceit and vanity in any common Christian to imagine that God will answer his prayers, but he does earnestly beg all common Christians (common or uncommon) to pray for him, and he does say that he fully expects partic- ular blessings through their prayers. And the Apostle James says indeed nothing about get- ting relief to a burdened heart by drinking tea without sugar, but he does say, confess your sins one to another, and pray one for another ; and he does not intimate that the prayers of a literary cowper's discernment. 337 man and a poet are of any greater efficacy before God than those of a poor schoolmaster ; he does not intimate that a man must be learned and refined before he can dare presume that God will hear his prayers ; neither does he intimate that prayers from the prayer-book will be heard, while extempore prayers from the Christian's own heart, if offered in the confidence that God will hear them, are only fanaticism and presumption. Furthermore, the sorrows, terrors, and burdens of the soul are the very evils of all others, in which God would have Christians seek the aid of one another's prayers ; and to rely on sincere prayer, in such a case, is not to rely on man, but God. The affectionate turning of Cowper's despairing heart to Mr. Teedon's prayers for spiritual sympa- thy and comfort is a most striking proof of the prevalence of faith and christian fellowship even above despair. Cowper felt a confidence in Mr. Teedon's christian character from long acquaint- ance with him ; and the failings of tediousness and verboseness in conversation, with some foibles of vanity even, were little things in comparison with the possession of an honest, grateful, and sympa- thizing heart. Cowper was not a man easily to be deceived or imposed upon, but he had very great discernment of character, and was never in the habit of concealing or denying his impressions. For example, in one of his letters to Newton, in 15 338 CHRISTIAN S Y II 1' A THY. the year 1784, lie thus speaks of a man whom they had both known, and whose professions of religious experience it would seem had been some- what large : " He says much about the Lord and His dealings with him ; but I have long considered James as a sort of peddler and hawker in these matters, rather than as a creditable and substan- tial merchant." Mr. Teedon, Cowper knew to be a very different person, sincere and fervent in his Christian emo- tions, and irreproachable in his Christian life. As he had known much of Cowper's trials, and for a long space of time, it was very natural that both Cowper and Mrs. Unwin should not turn away from a Christian sympathy expressed by him in notes as well as in conversation, but should some- what freely, and with kindness, answer his in- quiries. Hence the communications that sprang up between them ; earnest desires for prayer and help on the one side, and assurances of prayer and encouragements to hope that it would be answered on the other. The Christian circles at Olney and at Weston did not despise Mr. Teedon for his pov- erty, nor for the fact of his gaining an humble subsistence in the capacity of village schoolmaster ; nor did they regard it as a mark of egregious van- ity and conceit in him to suppose that God might possibly answer his prayers, any more than in Newton himself, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, praying on the Lord's day out of the prayer-book. CHAPTER XXVI LORD MAHON'S ACCUSATION AGAINST WESLEY. — THE IMMEDIATE EFFICACY OF PRAYER. — DANGER OF DELUSION IN A RELIGION ESTABLISHED BY THE STATE. — CONSISTENCY OF COWPER "WITH SCRIPTURE IN ASKING AN INTEREST IN OTHERS' PRAYERS. — LET- TERS TO NEWTON AND HAYLEY. Lord Mahon, in his History of England, in the chapter on Methodism, says that a " solemn accu- sation might have been brought against Wesley for the presumption with which he sometimes as- cribed immediate efficacy to his prayers." He also says, among other evils of his career enumerated, that "very many persons have been tormented with dreadful agonies and pangs '" besides the great evil of the Church being weakened by so large a separation from it as the formation of the Methodist churches occasioned. The agonies and pangs were simply those that Paul himself experienced when he found himself slain by the Law ; those that Bunyan and Luther experienced in a conflict protracted beneath the burden and the sense of guilt, much longer than Paul's was, before they would learn the lesson which 340 LORD M A II O N ON METHODISM. the Law, as our schoolmaster, was appointed to teach in bringing us to Christ ; and those that Cowper also experienced, but which Southey, and others with him, regarded as a dangerous delusion, re- sulting from an exaggerated idea of human de- pravity. If it is an evil that very many persons should be thus tormented, would ignorance of sin, and insensibility to its guilt and danger, be the smaller evil, or the preferable way ? Or is there any way into the kingdom of Heaven without some experience of such pangs and agonies ? There is indeed a way into the Church, smooth, easy, in- offensive ; but that is not necessarily Heaven, nor does belonging to the Church necessarily include the knowledge or experience of religion. Yet such would seem to be Lord Mahon's and Southey's idea of piety, or a main element in it, and security of it ; a religion established by the State ; a Church, the membership of which is to be accepted as salvation. And to compel people to come into the Church by pangs and agonies, when they ought to be members of it in their own right by law, by simple baptism and morality, is a great in- jury and oppression ! The historian's idea of religion must be curious, indeed, judging from such complaints. Then, again, it is asserted to be presumption, an element of fanaticism and vanity, such as Southey sa^ys Mr. Teedon was inspired with, for an individual Chris- EFFICACIOUS PHAYKK. 84 1 tian to suppose that God will hear and at once an- swer his prayers. For the immediate efficacy of prayer can be only in the way of such answer, and that is what the accusation means. A proper and respectable religion, therefore, such as is embodied in the Established Church of England, must, in the view of many, eschew and reject such an ele- ment. Prayer can be efficacious only by virtue of the Church, and can be answered only in a churchly way, but not for any individual soul by itself ! Is it possible that a man of intelligence and learning, with any knowledge of the Gospel, can deliberately repose his confidence on such a piety, and believe himself insured into salvation by organic Church life, and participant in the efficacy of prayer by belonging to a Church that has an established liturgy ? It were worth while for such a person to ques- tion with himself what could the Apostle James have meant, in referring all believers to the exam- ple of Elijah, as an incontrovertible proof that any believing soul, coming to God in the confidence that He is the rewarder of all who diligently seek Him, shall be likewise directly answered. Why did James take pains to remind us of the fact that Elias was a man subject to like passions as ourselves, except for the purpose of establishing the fact that it is a universal ride, irrespective of churches and of persons, that God does hear and 342 EXAMPL E OF ELIJAH answer prayer, if presented in sincerity and faith ? The case of Elias was a great precedent, interpret- ing this rule, first, because Elias was a man, not an angel, nor a Church ; second, because he was a man of the same passions and infirmities as we are, and not a perfect man, and neither heard nor answered on account of his perfection or his prayer- book, but on account of God's mercy and his own faith. So shall any man of like passions be heard and answered. Moreover, it were well to ask what would that personal piety be worth which was not distin- guished by a belief in the immediate efficacy of prayer ? Can there be such a thing as true prayer without something of that belief ? If the Lord Jesus has taught his disciples to pray, be- lieving that they shall receive those things for which they ask according to the will of God, and has even based the acceptableness of their prayers on that belief, then the disciple who has not that belief is destitute of an essential ingredient in the spirit of prayer. Perhaps Lord Mahon meant what the Duke of Wellington was wont to call fancy-prayers, that is, extempore prayers, without the prayer-book. Probably Lord Mahon, as a good Churchman, would not have ascribed presumption to Wesley, if he had prayed only out of the prayer- book ; would not have accused him of fanaticism for imagining an immediate efficacy in those EXTEMPORE PRAYER. 343 prayers. It was only Ms prayers, Wesley's, which it was presumptuous to suppose were attended with immediate efficacy ! And it would seem from such a scheme, that even if the prayers in the prayer-book are as- sumed and offered by individual members of the Church, it is presumption in any one to suppose that they can be answered as the prayers of the in- dividual, on the exercise of the individual's desires and faith ; such a thing as an answer is only to be expected on the ground of the right of the Es- tablished Church to present the supplication, and only through the mediation of the Church. The Church and the prayer-book in such a case are but the Pope and the Priest " writ large ;" and there is as effectual a barrier interposed between the soul and Christ, as there is by penance and the confes- sional, instead of prayer. A singular conception is the true historical con- ception of a religion established by the State ; — a religion simply and solely of prescribed forms and prayers, with a decent morality attached to them, together with a security against all enthusiasm. A conservative religion, protecting the community from being tormented with dreadful agonies and pangs, by the assurance of being personally stereo- typed into Heaven by reliance on the proxy of an accepted liturgy, efficacious on account of an organic Church-life, imparted through it to the 344 A FATAL DELUSION. soul of every worshiper ! How inestimable the favor of a sound religious currency established by law, as genuine and infallible as the notes of the Bank of England : an experience superscribed and minted, as the Church-and-Ceesar's appointed coin, the possessors of which shall defy all pangs and agonies, passing into the Kingdom Like the Iron Duke, by virtue of the prayer-book under his arm ! The holders of such coin look down with pity and contempt on an experience like that of John Bunyan, for example, as being the fever of a burning enthusiasm, from which the true Church happily exempts and defends her children. :: Very many persons have been tormented with dreadful agonies and pangs" by the undignified and cruel system of a personal experience of relig- ion introduced by John ^ r esley ; agonies and pangs under the conviction of being lost sinners, which might all have been avoided by trusting in the Church, the prayer-book, and the sacraments. Alas, what a frightful delusion is this ! And what multitudes of immortal beings, as capable of rea- soning in regard to their eternal destiny as Lord Mahon, and with the sacred Scriptures before them, are at this very day staking their all for eternity on the assurance that they are safe from perdition by the sacraments and the Church. With reference to just such a delusion prevailing in the Jewish Church, our Blessed Lord told the AKCHBISHOP SXCK1B. 345 Jews and His own disciples, that the children of the kingdom, they that trusted in the Church and in their belonging to it, should be cast into outer darkness, where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The Pharisee, belonging to the kingdom, ridicules the prayer of the humble Pub- lican, God be merciful to me a sinner I — and re- jects with contempt the idea of the fanaticism that would ascribe immediate efficacy to such prayer. Poor Mr. Teedon, the schoolmaster ! To think that Cowper should be reduced to such hu- miliation of mind as to beg an interest in such a Christian's prayers, and venture to hope for an answer to them ! It is an impressive and illustrative anecdote which is related of Archbishop Seeker on his sick bed, when visited by Mr. Talbot, Vicar of St. Giles's, Heading, who had lived in great intimacy with him, and received Iris preferment from him. " You will pray with me, Talbot," said the arch- bishop, during their interview. Mr. Talbot rose up, and went to look for a prayer-book. " That is not what I want now," said the dying prelate ; " kneel down by me, and pray for me in the way I know you are used to do." The man of God readily complied with this command, and kneeling down, prayed earnestly from his heart for his dying friend the archbishop, whom he saw ao more. 15* 34(J PROOF OF SANITY. We can see no reason why Mr. Teedon might not offer as earnest and acceptable prayer for Cow- per as Mr. Talbot for Archbishop Seeker. And if the archbishop needed such prayer when dying, and was not insane in asking for it, the poet also might have need of it living, and his seeking for it was not necessarily a proof of insanity, but the reverse. CHAPTER XXVII. IMPRESSIVE LESSONS FROM COWPER'S IMAGINARY DESPAIR. — GOD DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY TO BE WILLING TO BE DAMNED ; BUT ETERNAL SEPARATION FROM GOD IS DAMNATION. — MISTAKE OF MYSTICISM AND POETRY. — COWPER SUBMISSIVE TO GOD'S WILL, BUT NOT "WILLING TO BE SEPARATED FROM HIM. — COWPER'S GENTLENESS. — FALSE REMARK OF LEIGH HUNT IN REGARD TO ROMNEY'S PORTRAIT OF COWPER. The spectacle of Cowper's misery and helpless- ness beneath the despotism of an imaginary de- spair, conveys a most vivid and impressive lesson of the necessity of spiritual joy for active useful- ness. Hope is not only the anchor, but the im- pulsive power of the soul. Hence we see the error even in Madame Guion, of a mysticism that seeks to rise to an unreal exaltation, an imaginary and impossible elevation, not only not enjoined in the Word of God, but forbidden by the principles of true piety. One of her pieces, translated by Cow- per, contains the following stanza, supposed to be the language of a soul brought to such a point of absolute self-renunciation as to be willing that God should depart forever. And this is imagined 348 IMAGINARY B l T ii M I S S 1 O N . to be the ineffable point of acquiescence, to which God, in hiding His face, would bring the soul that loves Him. Translated from poetry into plain prose, it is the requisition that a man be willing to be damned ; that is to say, it is submission to Satan's will, not God's, that is required of the sinner ; for God's will is, that man should not only desire to be saved, but that every believing man shall be saved ; while Satan's will is, that man should be willing to be lost, and should be lost. '' Be not angry ; I resign, Henceforth, all my will to Thine : I consent that Thou depart Though Thine absence breaks my heart ; Go, then, and forever too ; All is right that Thou wilt do. This was just what Love intended. He was now no more offended : Soon as I became a child, Love returned to me and smiled." Now this is exaggeration to the verge of impiety. God says, Woe unto them, when I depart from them. And in all the realm of true theology there is not the beginning of a requisition from God that any of His creatures should be willing to have Him depart from them forever. Accord- ingly, we see how different was the character of Cowper's experience ; even in his madness, it was more consonant with God's Word. For he was IMAGINARY SUBMISSION. 349 not willing that God should depart from him, and while a ray of reason remained, he could not be. And, in truth, the whole essence and acuteness of his misery was in just this, that he believed God had dej)arted from him ; and hence he suffered, as far perhaps as any creature not deserted of God, but only under a delusion, could suffer, some- thing of the torture of eternal despair. If this belief had always prevailed, as in some exaspera- tions of his malady it did prevail, he could never have put pen to paper, never could have occupied his exquisite genius, his transparent intellect, so admirably balanced in all other respects, on any subject of thought whatever, and not even on the subject of his despair. There would have ensued the blackness and confusion of an absolute chaos. Again, and again, under the influence of such despair, Cowper exclaimed, Oh, that I had never been born, or that I could cease to be, forever ! How much truer to the truth, to the reality of things, in this matter, was Cowper's madness than Milton's poetry ! For Milton has put into the mouth of one of his lost angels, in melancholy eloquence of language, a preference of continued existence, even in despair and pain, rather than the cure by annihilation. *' And that must end us; that must bo our cure, To be no more : sad cure I for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being. Those thoughts that wander through eternity?" 350 SUFFERING WITH HOPE. But the absence of God from the soul, and an eternal banishment from Him, could not be com- patible with any joy or consolation from the thoughts that wander through eternity, at least was not in the case of Cowper. And it is worthy of notice that Milton himself has ascribed those lines to a slothful and ignoble devil, ever intent on making the worse appear the better reason, and has be- sides supposed the light of hope still shining, and the worst not known ; so that this language was not the language of despair. The fallen spirit that counseled sloth, not peace, imagined still that happier days might wait them : "Our Supreme Foe in time may much remit His anger ; and, perhaps, thus far removed, Nor mind us, not offending, satisfied With what is punished : whence these raging fires Will slacken if His breath stirs not their flames. Our purer essence then will overcome Their noxious vapor ; or inured, not feel ; Or changed at length, and to the place conformed In temper and in nature, will receive Familiar the fierce heat, and, void of pain, This horror will grow mild, this darkness light: Besides what hope the never-ending flight Of future days may bring, what chance, what change Worth waiting." This, then, is the reasoning, not even of im- aginary despair, but of hope ; while Cowper's in- sanity was the adoption of what the feelings and the language of absolute despair would have been, SUFFERING IN DESPAIR. 351 if real. Insanity itself is truer to nature than in- sensibility and unbelief; and insanity is preferable, in such an interest, to ignorance, presumption, and misrepresentation. And whatever men may think or say as to the cause of Cowper's insanity, there is a most in- structive lesson from its manifestation. It is a very solemn picture of the misery which may and must be consequent on the destruction of all hope in the eternal world. It can not be borne. The best constituted and the strongest mind can not endure it. If ever any man had a combination of faculties and feelings, of genius and affection, which could enable him to bear up under the pressure of sorrows, it was Cowper. He united in his own heart and intellect a sensitive nervous suscepti- bility, both natural and spiritual, to the touches both of sorrow and joy, and a tender, compassion- ate concern for others' distresses, along with an elastic, buoyant spirit, a native power of humor, and an exquisite relish of true wit and drollery, that could seize the element of laughter, even amid care and pain, and for the moment forget every thing but the ludicrous. Naturally, he loved to look on the bright side, not the dark, and was not to be imposed upon by the exaggeration of difficulties. Now in all common suffering, oil suffering this side that world where there is no suffering which is 352 a wounded s i j i r i t . not endless, these faculties, this happy constitution of mind and heart, would bear up a man through great conflicts, would support and encourage him. The spirit of such a man could sustain his in- firmity ; hut take away hope, and a spirit so wounded, who can bear ? No man, even in this life, can endure even the delusion of despair, the moment it approaches much resemblance to the reality. It is truly an infernal power, a power of madness, contradictory and chaotic, demonstrated by its hurrying even through self-murder, into the reality, beforehand. The very image is so terri- rible, that it takes away the reason. And faith in Christ, humble, affectionate confidence in Him, is the only true keeper of the reason of a fallen man. The peace of God, that passeth all under- standing, keeps both heart and mind in Christ Jesus, and that only can. And here, we must remark, what has never been properly noted, the characteristic of Cowper's insanity, as only against himself, but gentle, kind, affectionate, and loving toward all others. The whole circle and combination of his intellectual powers were transfused with adoration and love toward the Redeemer, and charity toward all mankind. His were a mind and affections sancti- fied, a tender conscience in reference to himself, a tender sympathy and forbearance toward others, entire freedom from bigotry, yet a most holvrever- SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENON. 353 ence toward God, an ardent love of the truth, and a jealousy for its purity, glory, and defense ; every fruit, and all the graces of the Spirit, in their turn, excepting that of hope only. A most extra- ordinary nature, a most marvelous development, a manifestation of piety, and a growth of holi- ness, even in a frozen zone, such as earth has rarely, if ever witnessed ; the growth of righteous- ness, even where the beams of the Sun of Right- eousness were intercepted by a malignant eclipse, nearly life-long ! A warm and open Polar Sea, and banks of tropical shrubbery and flowers upon its borders, amid surrounding ice-mountains, and beneath an atmosphere so freezing, that whole ships' crews have been rigidly fastened to their decks in death, even in the work of exploration, would not be so supernatural a phenomenon. This is what God can do, but not man ; grace, even de- nied and invisible, but not morality. Moreover, there was never, in Cowper's insanity, any thing of the ordinary repulsive or terrible character of madness, nor any approximation thereto ; never any malignity or fierceness toward others, but even in the uttermost sullenness of gloom, a timidity and meekness ; a harmlessness, as divested of the power and the disposition of violence and passion, as a crushed rose-bud, or a daisy trodden under foot. Hence the singular im- propriety and want of truth in that expression of 854 PORTRAITS OF COWPER. Leigh Hunt in regard to Cowper's picture, that it developed " a fire fiercer than that either of intel- lect or fancy, gleaming from the raised and pro- truded eye/' If that fierceness was in Romney's painting, it was wholly false to the original ; for none of his dearest and most intimate friends ever saw it, or imagined it, in Cowper's own counte- nance ; and it certainly never existed in his mel- ancholy. The thing lay wholly in the imagination of the critic ; for neither in the mind, nor looking out at the eve. was there ever anv flashing: of such a fire ; only a pensive or suffering expression, hut never a crazy, nor aggressive, nor glaring light. If such light were in the portrait, it would be a sure test of its untruth, and of the ambitious, hand of a painter striking at a caricature ; but it is en- tirely unlikely that Romney had any such inten- tion or idea. Hayley regarded the portrait as one of the most faithful and masterly resemblances he ever beheld ; and Cowper thought it strange that it should show no marks of his own habitual sor- row. Absurd, indeed, it was to speak of a fierce fire as gleaming from the eye ; absurd to imagine any ground for such a representation in the char- acter or habitual expression of the poet. Cowper's sonnet to the painter was composed in 1792. Romney ! expert infallibly to trace On chart or canvas, not the form alone And semblance, but, however faintly shown, The mind's impression, too, on every face. romney's portrait. 355 With strokes that time ought never to erase : Thou hast so pencil'd mine, that though I own The subject worthless, I have never known The artist shining with superior grace. But this I mark, that symptoms none of woe In thy incomparable work appear : Well ! I am satisfied it should be so, Since, on maturer thought, the cause is clear ; For in my looks what sorrow couldst thou see, When I was Hay ley's guest, and sat to thee ? The absurdity of supposing that the painter had either detected or portrayed the fire of in- sanity in a face, the owner of which was in the perfect possession and exercise of the gentlest affections, and of a cairn and reasoning mind, at the time when the portrait was taken, and had been for twenty years, with the exception of an interval of six months, is exceedingly great. The only interval of insanity from 1773 to 1792, the time when the portrait was taken, had been in the year 1787 ; and even in that attack there does not appear to have been any of the glaring of this un- natural fire, but simply the lowest depths of men- tal despondency and suffering. To suppose that the expression of such a transitory interval would predominate in Cowper's eye over the habitual character of twenty years of peacefulness and heavenly affection, would be contrary to all fact and reason ; and it is the veriest affectation or frenzy of critical discernment to imagine such an expression on the canvas. 3<3G iBBOT'fl P B I K A I T . Mr. Grimshaw, indeed, says that there was an air of wildness in Roniney's portrait of Cowper, ex- pressive of a disordered mind, which the shock produced by the paralytic attack of Mrs. Unwin was rapidly impressing on his countenance. The portrait by Abbot was that of his customary and more placid features. ISTow since Abbot's portrait was taken more immediately after Mrs. Unwin's illness than Roinney's, if Cowper's features had worn that air of wildness at all, it would most likely have been at that time ; in fact, when Romney painted him, Mrs. Unwin had received so much benefit from the journey to Eartham, that Cowper was greatly comforted, and in the very letter in which he announced to Lady Hesketh the completion of Ronmey's picture, he says concern- ing himself, " I am, without the least dissimula- tion, in good health ; my spirits are about as good as you "have ever seen them ; and if increase of appetite and a double portion of sleep be advan- tageous, such are the advantages that I have re- ceived from this migration. As to that gloominess of mind which I have had these twenty years, it cleaves to me even here, and, could I be translated to Paradise, unless I left my body behind me, would cleave to me even there also. It is my companion for life, and nothing will ever divorce us." The wildness in Cowper's face at this time, if EXACT RESEMBLANCE. 357 Ronmey threw such an expression on the canvas, was purely fanciful, and Cowper himself would have detected and marked it sooner than any one, had there been the fierce fire of insanity glaring from the eye. But neither his friends nor himself saw any such expression, though all agreed it was the most exact resemblance possible. In a letter written near this period to Mrs. Charlotte Smith the authoress, Cowper gives ex- pression to a very beautiful and tender train of contemplations awakened in his pensive mind by one of her remarks to Hayley. "I was much struck," says he, " by an expression in your letter to Hayley, where you say that you will endeavor to take an interest in green leaves again. This seems the sound of my own voice reflected to me from a distance, I have so often had the same thought and desire. A day scarcely passes at this season of the year, when I do not contemplate the trees so soon to be stripped, and say, Perhaps I shall never see you clothed again. Every year as it passes makes this expectation more reasonable ; and the year with me can not be very distant, when the event will verify it. Well ! may God grant us a good hope of arriving in due time, where the leaves never fall, and all will be right r This was written in the autumn of 1792, and only one more Spring ever came, in which that 358 L A \V B E K e B ' 6 1' (J B I B AIT. sensitive Christian poet, who had loved nature with such unaffected love, coidd ever again take his wonted interest in green leaves. The last years of his and Mrs. Unwin's life were like the ominous evolutions of a Greek tragedy, distinctly foreboded, and gloomily marching on with the de- cision of inexorable fate. A year and more after the date of Komney's painting, Lawrence executed another portrait of Cowper, in which, if in either of the three, the indications of gloom and wildness must have been visible, if drawn from nature. For it was at this time, October, 1793, that Cowper was in the greatest distress between the pressure of his mel- ancholy, the burden of engagements which he could not fulfill, and his anxiety of mind for poor Mrs. Unwin ; yet in Lawrence's picture there was not the least trace of the imagined supernatural fire. Early in November, Hayley paid him another visit, and it was the last in which Cowper's afflicted reason could enjoy a gleam of happiness. It was in reference to this visit that Hayley wrote his interesting description of the evils that seemed impending over the once cheerful household of his dear friend. " My fears for him in every point of view were alarmed by his present very singular condition. He possessed completely at this period all the admirable faculties of his mind, and all the HAYLEY AT WESTON. 359 native tenderness of his heart ; but there was something indescribable in his appearance which led me to apprehend that without some signal event in his favor, to reanimate his spirits, they would gradually sink into hopeless dejection. The state of his aged, infirm companion, afforded addi- tional ground for increasing solicitude. Her cheer- ful and beneficent spirit could hardly resist her own accumulated maladies, so far as to preserve ability sufficient to watch over the tender health of him whom she had watched and guarded so long." Only two months afterward, in 1794, Cowper wrote to his dear friend Kose, saying, " I have just ability enough to transcribe, which is all that I have to do at present ; God knows that I write at this moment under the pressure of sadness not to be described." In the course of two months more, Hayley was informed by a letter from Mr. Great- heed of the deplorable condition of Cowper beneath such an increase of his gloom, as almost to deprive him of the use of every faculty, threatening in- deed a speedy close of life. This letter was dated April 8th, 1794, and Hayley immediately on the receipt of it hastened to Weston ; but his clear friend was so profoundly overwhelmed and op- pressed beneath the anxiety and despair produced by the physical and mental malady, that he took no welcome notice of his coming, nor at any time 3tf0 n.VYLEY AT WESTON could manifest the least sign of pleasure at his presence ; although a few months before, nothing on earth except the presence of Lady Hesketh, whom he loved with as much tenderness as a sister, could have given him such delight as Hayley's visit. CHAPTER XXVIII. cowper's complaint and jeremiah's. — sincerity of cowper in every expression of christian feeling. — letter to mr. rose. — letters to untvin and newton. — christian experi- ence in spite of despair. christian sympathy in others' trials. — poem on the four ages. — mrs. unwin's illness and cowper's gloom. — poem to mary. The first eighteen verses of the third chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah are a most per- fect representation of the belief and experience of Cowper for the greater part of twenty years. " I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath. He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely, against me He is turned ; He turneth His hand against me all the day. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about that I can not get out ; He hath made my chain heavy. Also, when I cry and shout, He shutteth out my prayer. He hath filled me with bitterness, He hath made me drunken with worm- wood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravel- stones, He hath covered me with ashes. And 16 362 THE MOURNING PROPHET. I said, My strength and my hope arc perished from the Lord." But the misery of Cowper was, that in his case, that which, with the afflicted and mourning prophet, was the language of grief and of hope- lessness in regard to the overwhelming external desolations that had overtaken his beloved country in God's wrath (and he himself a hopeless sufferer in all those calamities), described a personal de- spair. The prophet could say, after all this most graphic catalogue of his woes, " The Lord is my portion, saith my soul ; therefore will I hope in Him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him : to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. For the Lord will not cast off forever ; but though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multi- tude of his mercies. I called upon Thy name, Lord, out of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice. Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee, thou saidst, Fear not. Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul, Thou hast redeemed my life." But Cowper's inexorable despair was continually crying, God is against me ; I am cut off forever from the light of the living, from the possibility of His mercy. Actum est de to ; periisti : My hope is perished from the Lord forever ! And HOPE IMTERISHABLE. 363 often he was compelled to cry out with the Psalm- ist, " While I suffer Thy terrors, I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves/' Yet never did Cowper's confidence in God's goodness fail ; and even through all this thick spiritual darkness, he was full of gratitude for the providential mercies of his Heavenly Father while reason remained ; nor did any Christian ever take greater delight in observing and recounting the footsteps of God's providence, and the marks of His interposing love. He was always ready to say with Jeremiah, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning ; great is Thy faithfulness." Moreover, we have seen at the bottom of all Cowper's complaints some remnant still of hope, some persevering conviction, as obstinate as his despair itself, of the possibility that God might yet interpose in his behalf, and deliver him from what would then and thus be demonstrated to have been the affliction of insanity, an imagination of a banishment from God, the work of an unset- tled reason under the buffetings of malignant spiritual foes. And we must bear in mind the anxious sincerity and carefulness of Cowper in every expression of his feelings, not to transcend the limits of his own actual experience in any 364 CHRISTIAN HOPE. Christian sentiment to which he ever gave utter- ance. The exquisite simplicity and transparency of his heart as well as intellect, his freedom from all pretense and guile, and from all affectation of any kind of ability or attainment which he did not possess, are to be remembered in perusing Cowper's letters of sympathy with the sorrows of his dearest friends. When we find him saying in effect, Courage, my brother ! we shall soon rejoin our lost one, and many whom we have tenderly loved, " our forerunners into a better country," the con- solation is so conveyed that we should feel as if it were almost a deception, if the writer himself were not a partaker of it. Just so, in all those sweet allusions now and then in Cowper's letters to the grounds of a Christian hope ; they are so expressed that it is impossible not to feel assured that they do not and can not proceed from a heart that feels as if God were an enemy, or believes that its own sins are not and can not be forgiven. There is the Christian hope in such expressions, by whatever depths of doubt surrounded. Take, for instance, the close of a letter, in 1791, to the Kev. Walter Bagot. " If God forgive me my sins, surely I shall love Him much, for I have much to be forgiven. But the quantum need not discour- age me, since there is One whose atonement can suffice for all." CHRISTIAN GRATITUDE. 365 Again, the record of Christian experience in a letter to the Kev. Mr. Hurdis, in 1793, is not con- sistent with the entire absence of hope, but inti- mates both the possession of a personal faith in the Lord Jesus, and the experience of deep grati- tude for the privilege of being permitted to exer- cise it. Cowper is speaking of the effect of ad- versity. " Your candid account," says he, " of the effect that your afflictions have, both on your spir- its and temper, I can perfectly understand, having labored much in that fire myself, and perhaps more than any other man. It is in such a school, how- ever, that we must learn, if we ever truly learn it, the natural depravity of the human heart, and of our own in particular, together with the conse- quence that necessarily follows such wretched premises ; our indispensable need of the atone- ment, and our inexpressible obligations to Him who made it. This reflection can not escape a thinking mind, looking back to those ebullitions of fretfulness and impatience to which it has yielded in a season of great affliction." Our inexpressible obligations. It is clear that Cowper felt them personally ; but how could this have been, had he really and truly believed himself shut out, by a solitary and anomalous decree, from the eternal benefit of the atonement ? Here, then, an unacknowledged, and almost unconscious, yet imperishable hope, contradicted the logic of 30b' LIFE IN A VINEGAR BOTTLE. his despair, as profoundly as his despair itself contradicted the assurances of Scripture and of reason. " Every proof of attention to a man who lives in a vinegar Dottle/' said Covvper to his friend Mr. Unwin, " is welcome from his friends on the out- side of it." Even in this vinegar bottle, Cowper could make merry with the surrounding world, as seen through the prism of his own melancholy. He told Mr. Unwin, in this same letter, that he forgave Dr. Johnson all the trivial and supersti- tious dotage in his diary, for the sake of one piece of instruction, namely, never to banish hope en- tirely, because it is the cordial of life, although it be the greatest flatterer in the w r orld. He adds, in regard to his own case, (i such a measure of hope as may not endanger my peace by a disappoint- ment, I would wish to cherish upon every subject in which I am interested. A cure, however, and the only one, for all the irregularities of hope and fear, is found in submission to the will of God. Happy they that have it." He told Newton, during that same year, 1785, that within eight months he had had his hopes, though they had been of short duration, and cut off like the foam upon the waters. " Some previous adjust- ments, indeed, are necessary, before a lasting ex- pectation of comfort can have place in me. There are persuasions in my mind, which either entirely LETTERS TO NEWTON. 367 forbid the entrance of hope, or, if it enter, imme- diately eject it. They are incompatible with any such inmate, and must be turned out themselves, before so desirable a guest can possibly have secure possession. This, you say, will be done. It may be, but it is not done yet, nor has a single step in the course of God's dealings with me been taken toward it. If I mend, no creature ever mended so slowly that recovered at last. I am like a slug, or snail, that has fallen into a deep well ; slug as he is, he performs his descent with an alacrity pro- portioned to his weight ; but he does not crawl up again quite so fast. Mine was a rapid plunge, but my return to daylight, if I am indeed returning, is leisurely enough." Cowper then beautifully refers to the value which he set upon Newton's letters, and to the circumstances under which the two friends first knew each other. " Your connection with me was the work of God. The kine that went up with the ark from Bethshemesh left what they loved behind them, in obedience to an impression which to them was perfectly dark and unintelligible. Your journey to Huntingdon was not less wonder- ful. He, indeed, who sent you, knew well where- fore, but you knew not." He then speaks of his own change under the gloom that had afflicted him, and of the constant affection of his friends. "I can say nothing of myself at present ; but this 368 FREEDOM AND FRANKNESS. I can venture to foretell, that should the restora- tion, of which my friends assure me, obtain, I shall undoubtedly love those who have continued to love me, even in a state of transition from my former self, much more than ever. I doubt not that Nebuchadnezzar had fiiends in his prosperity ; all kings have many. But when his nails became like eagles' claws, and he ate grass like an ox, I sup- pose he had few to pity him/' In one of his letters to Mr. Rose, in 1783, Cowper apologized at the close of it for the sermonizing strain in which he said he had written it. But he added, " I always follow the leading of my uncon- strained thoughts when I write to a friend, be they grave or otherwise." At the beginning of this let- ter, Cowper excused himself for not answering Mr. Rose's epistle sooner, and told him that an unan- swered letter troubled his conscience in some de- gree like a crime, and that he approached him once more in the correspondence not altogether despairing of forgiveness. If this letter had been written to Newton instead of Mr. Rose, Southey would probably have taken the opportunity to renew his insinuation that Cowper was always ser- monizing to Newton, and went to his correspond- ence with, him as unwillingly as if were going to confession. This letter to Mr. Rose is a complete answer to so dishonorable an imputation. Cowper never wrote, never ivould write, under constraint, FREEDOM AND FRANKNESS. 869 much less would he sermonize to please others, when his heart did not dictate the strain of re- mark His correspondence with Newton is as free and familiar as with any of his friends, and it was always unaffectedly and delightfully easy with them all. One of his letters to Newton beautifully de- scribes the insupportable irksomeness of a state of confinement or restraint. Other letters equally manifest his independence and frankness, and the indignation with w T hich he could repel a false ac- cusation. " I could not endure the room in which I now write," says he, u were I conscious that the door were locked. In less than five minutes I should feel myself a prisoner, though I can spend hoars in it, under an assurance that I may leave it when I please, without experiencing any tedium at all. It was for this reason, I suppose, that the yacht was always disagreeable to me. I make little doubt but Noah was glad when he was en- larged from the ark ; and we are sure that Jonah was when he came out of the fish ; and so was I to escape from the good sloop Harriet." All the efforts of Cowper's original genius were spontaneous efforts, and even the translation of Homer was a great work, into which he fell as by accident, while pursuing a mere experiment, and afterward continued it to the end, as a ship by stress of weather must sometimes run before the 16* 370 THE M1LTONI A N TRAP. gale all the way across an ocean, unable to put into a harbor. When he had finished that work, his mind once more reverted frequently and with fondness to the happier employment more con- genial with his tastes, and suggested by his in- evitable consciousness of renewed poetical power. Under these circumstances, it was much to be regretted that any new engagements with Milton or Homer should have been laid upon him. While harassed by obligations, which, once assumed, rested with a weight upon his conscience, he felt as if a lasso had been thrown over his genius, and he had become a slave. He longed to be engaged in the work of original poetical composition. " How often do I wish in the course of every day," says he, in a letter to Hayley, in 1792, " that I could be employed once more in poetry, and how often, of course, that this Miltonian trap had never caught me ! The year '92 shall stand chronicled in my remembrance as the most melan- choly that I have ever known, except the few weeks that I spent at Eartham ; and such it has been, principally because, being engaged to Milton, I felt myself no longer free for any other engage- ment. That ill-fated work, impracticable in itself, has made every thing else impracticable." Again, to Hayley, in 1793: "No! I shall neither do, nor attempt any thing of consequence more, unless my poor Mary get better ; nor even THE FOUR AGES. 871 then (unless it should please God to give me an- other nature) in concert with any man ; I could not, even with my own father or brother, were they now alive. Small game must serve me at present, and till I have done with Homer and Milton, a sonnet, or some such matter, must con- tent me. The utmost that I aspire to, and Heaven knows with how feeble a hope, is to write at some better opportunity, and when my hands are free, ' The Four Ages/ Thus have I opened my heart unto thee." The idea of a poem on the Four Ages, from the first moment of its suggestion, seems to have filled the mind and heart of Cowper with delight. Even beneath the pressure of sorrow and despair, he commenced it in a manner so sublime, and with execution so perfect, that if it had been com- pleted in the same style, it would have been in no respect inferior to "The Task/' but probably more profound and grand in thought and imagery. He had a multitude of small pieces, from which he intended to make a selection, and add them to the Four Ages in one volume. Afterward he con- sented to a proposition of Hayley to unite with him in the authorship of the proposed poem, and the two distinguished artists, Lawrence and Flax- man, were to have furnished the work with the most exquisite possible designs. Cowper told Hayley that if it pleased God to afford him health, spirits, 372 THE FOUR AGES. ability, and leisure, he would nut iail to devote them all to the production of his quota of " The Four Ages." The conception of this poem was suggested to Cowper by the Rev. Mr. Buchanan, a clergyman at Ravenstone, near Weston. Having become personally acquainted with Cowper, he wrote to him, in the spring of 1793, such a plan of a pro- posed poem on the four seasons of human life, in- fancy, youth, manhood, and old age, that Cowper was filled with admiration, both of the sketch and the subject. Mr. Buchanan rightly judged that it would be peculiarly suited to the genius, taste, and piety of Cowper, affording the happiest possible field for the exercise of all his exquisite sensibili- ties, his powers of imagination, wit, and humor, his playful affections, his early knowledge of the world, his attainments in religion, and the wisdom he had gained from experience. If Lady Austen's suggestion of the Sofa could call forth such happy trains of thought, feeling, and imagery from Cow- per's mind, what might not have been expected from a proposition fraught with so much thought and beauty, the intimated outlines of which so greatly charmed the poet that he immediately ad- dressed his friendly correspondent the following letter : " My Dear Sir — You have 6ent me a beautiful poem, wanting nothing but meter. I would t^ THE FOUR AGES. 373 Heaven that you would give to it that requisite yourself ; for he who could make the sketch, can not but be well qualified to finish. But if you will not, I will ; provided always, nevertheless, that God gives me ability, for it will require no common share to do justice to your conceptions." But Cowper soon began to fear, as he said, " that all his own ages would be exhausted" before he should find leisure to engage in such a compo- sition ; and he regretted more than ever the en- gagement that had bound him down to Homer and Milton. It was with this feeling, and with sorrow that his powers could not have been em- ployed in work more positively Christian in its character, that he composed the beautiful sonnet to " his kinsman as a son beloved," the Eev. Mr. Johnson, who had presented him with a bust of Homer, " the sculptured form of his old favorite bard." It awakened in him both joy and grief. The grief is this, that sunk in Homer's mine, I lose my precious years, now soon to fail ! Handling his gold, which, howsoe'er it shine, Proves dross when balanced in the Christian scale 1 Be wiser, thou ! like our forefather Donne, Seek heavenly wealth, and work for God alone ! At a still later date, writing to Hayley, he says, in regard to his promised labors on Milton, he feels like a man who has sprained his wrist, and dreads 374 TASK-WORK. to use it. " The consciousness that there is so much to do, and nothing done, is a burden I am not able to bear. Milton especially is my griev- ance, and I might almost as well be haunted by his ghost, as goaded with continual reproaches for neglecting him." Writing to Hayley, in the spring of 1793, he says : " Sometimes I am seriously almost crazed with the multiplicity of the matters before me, and the little or no time I have for them ; and sometimes I repose myself after the fatigue of that distraction on the pillow of despair ; a pillow which has often served me in the time of need, and is become, by frequent use, if not very com- fortable, at least convenient. So reposed, I laugh at the world and say, Yes, you may gape, and ex- pect both Homer and Milton from me, but I '11 be hanged if ever you get them." The combination of such tasks with the care of his dear helpless friend, and his extreme anxiety and watchfulness on her account, proved entirely too much for Cowper's nervous system. It was overtasked before he was aware. Speaking of Mrs. Unwinds long-continued watch- fulness over Cowper's health, and affectionate min- istrations to his comfort, Hayley described in tender and guarded language the change pro- duced in her by the effects of paralysis ; a change, the contemplation of which, undoubtedly, was one CARE OF MRS. UHWIN. 370 exasperating cause of the final attack of Cowpers malady. Hayley's last visit to Cowper, that could afford any pleasure, was only two months before that attack, and the sight of Mrs. Unwinds in- creasing helplessness, both physical and mental, was very painful, the more so, as it was then im- possible to withdraw Cowper from the constant care and anxiety which in his turn he endured for her. " Imbecility of body and mind/' says Hay- ley, " must gradually render this tender and heroic woman unfit for the charge which she had so laudably sustained. The signs of such imbecility were beginning to be painfully visible ; nor can nature present a spectacle more truly pitiable than imbecility in such a shape, eagerly grasping for dominion, which it knows not either how to retain or how to relinquish." How Cowper himself felt in the sight of Mrs. Unwin's increasing infirmities and helplessness, is made affectingly clear in that most pathetic poem addressed to her at this time, with the simple title, " To Mary." The twentieth year is well-nigh past, Since first our sky was overcast, Ah, would that this might be the last I My Mary ! Thy spirits have a fainter flow, I see thee daily weaker grow ; 'T was my distress that brought thee low, My Mary ! 376 POEM TO MARY. Thy needles, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust disused, and shine no more, My Mary 1 For though thou gladly wouldst fulfill The same kind office for me still, Thy sight now seconds not thy will, My Mary ! But well thou play'dst the housewife's part j And all thy threads with magic art, Have wound themselves about this heart, My Maryl Thy indistinct expressions seem Like language uttered in a dream ; Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme, My Mary! Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, Are still more lovely in my sight, Than golden beams of orient light, My Mary I For could I view nor them, nor thee, What sight worth seeing could I see ? The sun would rise in vain for me, My Maryl Partakers of thy sad decline, Thy hands their little force resign ; Yet gently pressed, press gently mine, My Mary! Such feebleness of limbs thou prov'st, That now at every step thou mov'st Upheld by two ; — yet still thou lov'st, My Mary! And still to love, though pressed with ill, In wint'ry age to feel no chill. "With me is to bo lovely still, My Mary ! A DISTRESSING YEAR. 877 But, ah 1 by constant heed I know, How oft the sadness that I show, Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe, My Maryl And should my future lot be cast With much resemblance of the past, Thy worn out heart will break at last, My Mary ! The year 1792, after his return from his visit to Hayley, was indescribably distressing to him. "In vain/' says he, "I pray to be delivered from these distressing experiences ; they are only mul- tiplied upon me the more, and the more pointed. I feel myself, in short, the most unpitied, the most unprotected, and the most unacknowledged out- cast of the human race." Yet there was one transitory interval of happiness, unspeakably pre- cious, which he noticed in a letter to Newton, as " a manifestation of God's presence vouchsafed to me a few days since ; transient, indeed, and dimly seen through a mist of many fears and troubles, but sufficient to convince me, at least, while the Enemy's power is a little restrained, that God has not cast me off forever/' This interval is described more particularly in a letter to Mr. Teedon. " On Saturday, you saw me a little better than I had been when I wrote last ; but the night following brought with it an uncom- mon deluge of distress, such as entirely over- whelmed and astonished me. My horrors were not to be described. But on Sunday, while I 376 INTERVAL OF PRAYER. walked with Mrs. Unwin and my cousin in the orchard, it pleased God to enable me once more to approach Him in prayer, and I prayed silently for every tiling that lay nearest my heart with a considerable degree of liberty. Nor did I let slip the occasion of praying for you. This experience I take to be a fulfillment of those words, ' The ear of the Lord is open to them that fear Him, and He will hear their cry/ And ever since I was favored with that spiritual freedom to make my requests known to God, I have enjoyed some quiet, though not uninterrupted by threatenings of the Enemy." But still the gloom deepened. Sometimes he described himself even to Hayley, as " hunted by spiritual hounds in the night-season." " Prayer I know is made for me," says he to Mr. Newton, "and sometimes with great enlargement of heart by those who offer it ; and in this circumstance con- sists the only evidence I can iind, that God is still favorably mindful of me, and has not cast me off forever." "As to myself, I have always the same song to sing, well in body, but sick in spirit, sick, nigh unto death. Seasons return, but not to me returns God, or the sweet approach of heavenly day, Or sight of cheering truth, or pardon sealed, Or joy, or hope, or Jesus' face divine, But cloud instead, and ever-during dark . I could easily set my complaint to Milton's tune, and accompany him through the whole passage, on INTERVAL OF PRAYER. 879 the subject of a blindness more deplorable than his : but time fails me." Now we do not know of any thing more tenderly affecting in Cowper's whole history, nor more illus- trative of a grateful and affectionate heart, than the interval of hope and prayer above recorded, and the use which Cowper made of it. Nor did I let slip the occasion of praying for you. Cowper thought that it was in answer to Mr. Teedon's earnest interceding prayers, in part at least, that he owed that celestial freedom (and who shall pre- sume to say that it was not ?), and with grateful love he asked God's blessing on his humble ben- efactor, even amid his own sufferings. It is an exquisitely beautiful proof how truly Cowper's spiritual life was hid with Christ in God, even when he thought it had expired in darkness. If all of Cowper's correspondence with Mr. Teedon had been the means of only this incident, and its record, we should rejoice in it as a lovely revela- tion of Cowper's character, and a sweet evidence of his communion with God, even then, when he thought himself cut off from hope and Heaven. Yet this is the correspondence, and the interchange of prayer, on which Sputhey thought fit to expend his ridicule ; and some have followed in the same strain ! Kightly considered, the record is adapted to fill the mind only with admiration and with reverential praise. CHAPTER XXIX. FINAL AND FATAL RECURRENCE OF COWPER'S MALADY. — LADT HESKETH'S AFFECTIONATE CARE. — DEPARTURE OF COWPER AND MRS. UN WIN FROM WESTON. — MRS. UNWINS DEATH. — COWPER'S LETTERS AND TERRORS. — THE PROGRESS OF HIS DESPAIR. — LAST LETTER TO NEWTON. — LAST ORIGINAL COMPOSITION. — THE CAST- AWAY. — RELEASE AND DELIVERANCE. In the year 1794, when the dreadful malady in- creased upon Cowper with all its early force, his beloved cousin, Lady Hesketh, hastened to his care. She found him in a most deplorable condi- tion, and the description of the circumstances in her letters makes us rather wonder that he had not been sooner and more completely overwhelmed. Mrs. Unwin had sunk, after her last attack of the palsy, into second childhood. Hayley says : "The distress of heart that he felt in beholding the cruel change in a conrpanion so justly dear to him, con- spiring with his constitutional melancholy, was gradually undermining the exquisite faculties of his mind." He then refers to Lady Hesketh's cheerful and affectionate kindness, as an angel of mercy, u who now devoted herself to the superin- LADY HE8KETH'S LETTER. 381 tendence of a house, whose two interesting inhab- itants were rendered, by age and trouble, almost incapable of attending to the ordinary offices of life. Those only who have lived with the superannuated and the melancholy can properly appreciate the value of such magnanimous friendship, or perfectly apprehend what personal sufferings it must cost a frame of compassionate sensibility/' Lady Hesketh, after noting that this last inter- val of Cowper's dreadful dejection began in the month of which he always lived in terror, that of January, says that she found him on her arrival " the absolute nurse of this poor lady Mrs. Unwin, who can not move out of her chair without help, nor walk across the room unless supported by two people ; added to this, her voice is almost wholly unintelligible, and as their house was repairing all summer, he was reduced, poor soul, for many months, to have no conversation but hers. You must imagine, sir, that his situation was terrible indeed ; and the more, as he was deprived, by means of this poor lady, of all his wonted exer- cises, both mental and bodily, as she did not choose he should leave her for a moment, or use a pen, or a book except when he read to her, which is an employment that always, I know, fatigues and hurts him, and which therefore my arrival re- lieved him from. I thought him, on the whole, 382 COW P E It "' f REMOVAL. better than 1 expected he would have been in such a situation." In another letter, Lady Hesketh described the increasing force of Cowper' s malady, and the ter- rors that were gathering around him. " He is now come to expect daily, and even hourly, that he shall be carried away ; — and he kept in his room from the time breakfast was over till four o'clock on Sunday last, in spite of repeated mes- sages from Mrs. Unwin, because he was afraid somebody would take possession of his bed, and prevent his lying down on it any more !" In July, 1795, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin were both removed from Weston to North Tuddenham, under the affectionate care of Mr. Johnson, and from thence, in August, to Mundesley, on the coast of Norfolk. While at Tuddenham, Cowper and Johnson walked over together to the village of Mattishall, on a visit to Mrs. Bodham, the poet's cousin. Cowper's own portrait by Abbot was there, taken at Weston in July, 1792, when Cow- per and Mrs. Unwin were on the eve of their jour- ney to Mr. Hayley's, at Eartham. He was then filled with trembling apprehensions on her account, and beginning to be harassed with a thousand anxieties about the pilgrimage of a hundred and twelve miles ; hunted, as he told Hayley, by spir- itual hounds in the night season, and scared with dreaming visions more terrific than ever. Yet PORTRAIT BY ABBOT. 383 nothing of such terror was imprinted by day upon his mild and pensive countenance, and the portrait by Abbot was a most successful effort. Every creature that saw it was astonished at the resem- blance. Cowper wrote Hayley that Sam's boy bowed to it, and Beau, his dog, walked up to it, wagging his tail as he went, aud evidently show- ing that he acknowledged its likeness to his master. Now it is a most impressive sign of the acute- ness of Cowper's mental distress, that, notwith- standing the sadness and dejection of his state when this picture was taken, it was, by comparison with his present darkness and despair, a season of most enviable light and enjoyment. When his gaze rested on the portrait at Mrs. Bodham's house, he clasped his hands, according to Hayley's ac- count, in a paroxysm of pain, and uttered a vehe- ment wish that his present sensations might be such as they were when that picture was painted ! While at Mundesley, Cowper wrote a single let- ter to Mr. Buchanan, the only effort he had been able to make, even in epistolary correspondence with his dearest friends (except Lady Hesketh) for a considerable interval. He longed to hear some- thing from his beloved home at Weston, and closed his letter with a request, most tenderly illustrating the strength of his home affections and sensibili- ties. " Tell me if my poor birds are living ! I 384 COWPER AT DUNHAM. never see the herbs I used to give them without a recollection of them, and sometimes am ready to gather them, forgetting that I am not at home." In 1796, the two invalids resided with Mr. Johnson at Dunham Lodge, whence in September they again visited the sea-side at Mundesley, but in October retired to Mr. Johnson's house in Dun- ham for the winter. There Mrs. Unwin died, at the age of seventy-two ; but the extreme de- pression of spirits produced by Cowper's malady prevented him entirely from the experience of that distress and anguish, with which such an event would, in a state of health and hope, have over- whelmed him. From the day of her death, he never mentioned her name, and seemed not even to retain the remembrance of such a person ever having existed. He continued under the same de- pression through the year 1797, but was persuaded by the affectionate and winning entreaties of his young kinsman to renew his labors on the revisal of his Homer, notwithstanding the pressure of his malady. The year 1798 passed away with but little variation in his state, and by the 8th of March, 1799, he had completed the revisal of the Odyssey, and the next morning wrote part of a new preface. But this was his last continuous in- tellectual effort, although he wrote one or two gloomy letters, and one more original poem. The perusal of the letters (few, and despairing SUFFERING UN DESCRIBED. 385 even to incoherence) which he wrote to Lady Hes- keth, from 1795 to 1798, fills the mind with amazement that he could in such a state apply himself to any intellectual occupation. We also admire, with Hayley, the tender and ingenious as- siduity of Cowper's young kinsman, under whose care these melancholy years were passed, that could engage in such effort a being so hopelessly depressed. "Even a stranger may consider it a strong proof of his tender dexterity in soothing and guiding the afflicted poet, that he was able to engage him steadily to pursue and finish the revisal and correction of his Homer during a long period of bodily and mental sufferings, when his troubled mind recoiled from all intercourse with his most intimate friends, and labored under a morbid ab- horrence of all cheerful exertion." These letters to Lady Hesketh also let us into the knowledge of sufferings which Cowper never described, nor attempted to recount to any mortal in the former attacks of his distressing malady. Those attacks had been so sudden and so over- whelming, that he could not put pen to paper, nor indeed endure any communication, even with his dearest friends, and he never could bring himself to any detail of what he passed through. But this final attack was more gradual, and was not so absolute, did not so entirely plunge him beyond the reach of any sympathetic voice ; and the few 17 386 LETTERS TO LADY HESKETH. letters he undertook to Lady Hesketh really do more than any thing else toward unvailing the en- tanglement of infernal delusions, that lay like knotted snakes at the bottom of those depths down which his afflicted reason had been flung. The first of these sad and singular records was at Mundesley, where by the sea-shore Cowper had loved to wander in his earlier days, and had ex- pressed to his friends the sublime impressions pro- duced by the sight of the ocean, and the softly soothing melancholy into which the sound of the breaking billows had often composed his thoughts. But now the wildest storm upon the sea was rapture in comparison with the anguish and deso- lating apprehensions that filled his soul. " The most forlorn of beings/' says he, " I tread a shore under the burden of infinite despair that I once trod all cheerfulness and joy. I view every vessel that approaches the coast with an eye of jealousy and fear, lest it arrive with a commission to seize me. But my insensibility, which you say is a mys- tery to you, because it seems incompatible with such fear, has the effect of courage, and enables me to go forth, as if on purpose to place myself in the way of danger. The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down from ; and yester- day evening, by moonlight, I paused sometimes within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would probably have been to be dashed in LETTERS TO LADY HESKETH. 387 pieces. But though to have been dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other means. At two miles' distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I have visited it twice, and have found it an em- blem of myself. Torn from my natural connec- tions, I stand alone, and expect the storm that shall displace me." " I have no expectation that I shall ever see you more, though Samuel assures me that I shall visit Weston again, and that you will meet me there. My terrors, when I left it, would not per- mit me to say — Farewell, forever — which now I do ; wishing, but vainly wishing, to see you yet once more, and equally wishing that I could now as confidently, and as warmly as once I could, sub- scribe myself affectionately yours ; but every feel- ing that could warrant the doing it, has, as you too well know, long since forsaken the bosom of " W. C." This was written in August, 1795. In Septem- ber there is a renewal of the same despairing monody, and an evident perplexity of mind in vainly striving to penetrate the mystery of his fate, which it is truly affecting to witness. " I shall never see Weston more, I have been tossed 388 LETTERS TO LADY HESKETH. like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me. There, indeed, I lived a life of infinite despair, and such is my life in Norfolk. Such, indeed, it would be in any given spot upon the face of the globe ; but to have passed the little time that remained to me there, was the de- sire of my heart. My heart's desire, however, has been always frustrated in every thing that it ever settled on, and by means that have rendered my disappointments inevitable. When I left Weston, I despaired of reaching Norfolk, and now that I have reached Norfolk, I am equally hoj^eless of ever reaching Weston more. What a lot is mine ! Why was existence given to a creature that might possibly, and would probably become wretched in the degree that I have been so ? and whom mis- ery such as mine was almost sure to overwhelm in a moment. But the question is vain. I existed by a decree from which there was no appeal, and on terms the most tremendous, because unknown to, and even unsuspected by me ; difficult to be complied with, had they been foreknown, and un- foreknown, impracticable. Of this truth, I have no witness but my own experience ; a witness, whose testimony will not be admitted. * ° ° I remain the forlorn and miserable being I was when I wrote last." A few months after this letter, he has evidently, in January, 1T96, gone down a few fathoms deeper DEFINITE DELUSIONS. 389 in this tremendous gloom. Yet the manner in which he writes concerning these experiences has something in it, notwithstanding his assertion of the certainty of his dreadful doom, like the air of one who half suspects himself of being in a trance or dream. It is at least so far unreal, that he per- plexes himself about it ; and every advance into a deeper darkness makes him perceive that in the preceding darkness there was light. The idea that Lady Hesketh has described in one of her letters as possessing him, that he was to be suddenly and bodily carried away to a place of torment, haunted him more and more : it was but the more definite converging and concentration of that indefinable, anxious, and ominous foreboding of the future, under which he had so often described himself to Newton and other dear friends, in deeply inter- esting letters, as borne down beneath a weight of apprehension that almost rendered life intolerable. " I seem to myself/' he said to Newton, in 1792, "to be scrambling always in the dark, among rocks and precipices, without a guide, but with an enemy ever at my heels prepared to push me headlong." So long as the delusion was general, Cowper was sane, though beneath such a weight of suffering from the slow nervous and mental fever of his gloom. But in proportion as the delusion took a definite form, his reason gave way before it, though 390 PROCESS OF INSANITY. his senses were continued to him, only, as he im- agined, that he might look forward to the worst. We see the process of his insanity in these letters with a terrible distinctness ; he himself, the victim, describing the symptoms and experiences step after step, till he can write no more, till we lose sight of him in the darkness, and can only imagine, what more than is related, his sensitive nature may have suffered, before the Kedeemer, who was al- ways with him, gave him an eternal deliverance. What David, amid the distraction of his terrors, could say, was not less true of Cowper, even when despair was too absolute to admit of his believing the consolation, " When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then Thou knewest my path !" He says to Lady Hesketh, under date of Jan- uary 22, 1796 : "I have become daily and hourly worse ever since I left Mundesley ; then I had something like a gleam of hope allowed me, that possibly my life might be granted to me for a lon- ger time than I had been used to suppose, though only on the dreadful terms of accumulating future misery on myself, and for no other reason ; but even that hope has long since forsaken me, and I now consider this letter as the warrant of my own dreadful end ; as the fulfillment of a word heard in better days, at least six-and-twenty years ago. A word which to have understood at the time INVOLUTIONS OF DESPAIR. 391 when it reached me, would have been, at least might have been, a happiness indeed to me ; but my cruel destiny denied me the privilege of under- standing any thing, that, in the horrible moment came winged with my immediate destruction, might have served to aid me. You know my story far better than I am able to relate it. Infinite de- spair is a sad prompter. I expect that in six days' time, at the latest, I shall no longer foresee, but feel, the accomplishment of all my fears. Oh, lot of unexampled misery incurred in a moment ! Oh, wretch ! to whom death and life are alike im- possible ! Most miserable at present in this, that being thus miserable, I have my senses continued to me, only that I may look forward to the worst. It is certain, at least, that I have them for no other purpose, and but very imperfectly, even for this ! My thoughts are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is grasped, slips the sooner away. Mr. Johnson reads to me, but I lose every other sen- tence through the inevitable wanderings of my mind, and experience, as I have these two years, the same shattered mode of thinking on every sub- ject, and on all occasions. If I seem to write with more connection, it is only because the gaps do not appear. Adieu ! — I shall not be here to re- ceive your answer, neither shall I ever see you more. Such is the expectation of the most des- perate and most miserable of all beings/' 392 FIRST AND LAST CRISIS. Now if the readers of this letter will turn back to the description given of Cowper's state in his first dread conflict bordering on insanity, when he wished for madness as a relief from what to him seemed the worse misery of the dreaded public examination, for which he knew himself to be unfitted, there will be found a singular analogy between this latter crisis of Cowper's malady and the first. The cycle seemed to have been run, and he had come round to the point where he started. In both cases, he seemed to himself to have possession of his senses, only that he might know and calculate more certainly his coming doom. But in the first case, there was no awak- ened and regenerated conscience, and under the pressure of his misery he rushed madly to the purpose of self-destruction, bracing himself against whatever he might meet in the future world. Then, when conscience was roused and goaded into fury by the frustrated attempt at self-murder, it was her scorpion sting that inflicted the misery, and produced the gloom, in which he was buried till the face of Christ was revealed to him, and he re- ceived grace to believe. But into the last crisis and conflict the element of an angry conscience did not once enter, nor of a rebellious will. He lay as still and submissive as a weaned child, though the subject at the same time of such dreadful despair, and of such dis- FIRST AND LAST CRISIS. 393 torting and maddening delusions about the purposes of God in regard to him. If language like the outcries of Job sometimes gave utterance to his passionate grief, and he was almost ready to curse his day, yet he never questioned God's righteous- ness ; nay, at times the very madness of the in- sanity was in this imagination, that God's truth and righteousness required his destruction. It is singularly interesting to compare the two ex- tremes ; the first, when he entered into his in- sanity from a careless and impenitent heart, and irreligious life ; the last, when from a life of faith, patience, submission, meekness, prayer, and inces- sant effort after God, and with a conscience beyond question sprinkled by atoning blood, he went clown for the last time into the same dreadful chaps and gloom, unirradiated by one gleam of hope, yet on the very verge of Heaven, immediately to emerge into its eternal light and glory ! Under date of February 19, 1T96, Cowper again wrote to Lady Hesketh, in the same strain. " Could I address you as I used to do, with what delight should I begin this letter ! But that de- light, and every other sensation of the kind, has long since forsaken me forever. • * • All my themes of misery may be summed in one word. He who made me, regrets that ever He did. Many years have passed since I learned this terrible truth from Himself, and the interval has been spent ac- 17* 394 DREAD u F DBIKBTIOK. cordiugly. Adieu — I shall write to you no more. I am promised months of continuance here, and should be somewhat less a wretch in my present feelings could I credit the promise, but effectual care is taken that I shall not. The night contra- dicts the day, and I go down the torrent of time into the gulf that I have expected to plunge into so long. A few hours remain, but among those few, not one is found, a part of which I shall ever employ in writing to you again. Once more, therefore, adieu, and adieu to the pen forever. I suppress a thousand agonies, to add only, " W. C." It is a most affecting picture which is given at this time of Cowper's desolate and trembling state, and of the fearful apprehensions that beset him, by his kinsman Mr. Johnson, when he tells us that " the tender spirit of Cowper clung exceedingly to those about him, and seemed to be haunted with a continual dread that they would leave him alone in his solitary mansion. Sunday, therefore, was a day of more than ordinary apprehension to him, as the furthest of his kinsman's churches being fifteen miles from the Lodge, he was necessarily absent during the whole of the Sabbath. On these occasions, it was the constant practice of the de- jected poet to listen frequently on the steps of the hall-door for the barking of dogs at a farm-house, LET I L K TO LADY HESKETH. 395 which, in the stillness of the night, though at nearly the distance of two miles, invariably an- nounced the approach of his companion/' Once again, in 1797, Cowper wrote a few lines to Lady Hesketh. " To you once more," says he, " and too well I know why, I am under cruel ne- cessity of writing. Every line that I have ever sent you, I have believed under the influence of infinite despair, the last that I should ever send. This I know to be so. Whatever be your condi- tion, either now or hereafter, it is heavenly com- pared with mine, even at this moment. It is unnecessary to add that this comes from the most miserable of beings, whom a terrible minute made such." The post-mark of this letter was May 15, 1797, but there was neither date nor signature, a picture of the painful confusion, and almost chaos, of the poet's suffering mind. Indeed, these letters disclose, by glimpses, the distraction and misery of the writer, just as the flashes of lightning over the sea, in a dark and stormy night, might reveal the form of a dismasted ship driving wrecked before the tempest. There were three similar letters in 1798, in the second of which, speaking of the universal blank that even nature had become to him, though once he was susceptible of so much pleasure from the delightful scenes Lady Hesketh had been describ- ing, he says, " My state of mind is a medium 396 DOC I li 1 N 1 9V X E C E B S I T Y . through which the beauties of Paradise itself could not be communicated with any effect but a painful one." In the third, and last he ever wrote to her, in December, 1798, he was in full possession of his faculties, except for the weight of the mountain of his despair, yet wrote under the idea that all his volitions and actions were the result of an in- evitable and eternal necessity. He described him- self as giving all his miserable days, and no small portion of his nights also, to the revisal of his Homer ; a hopeless employment, he said, on every account, both because he himself was hopeless wmile engaged in it, and because, with all his labor, it was impossible to do justice to the an- tique original in a modern language. " That under such disabling circumstances, and in despair both of myself and of my work, I should yet at- tend to it, and even feel something like a wish to improve it, would be unintelligible to me, if I did not know that my volitions, and consequently my actions, are under a perpetual, irresistible influ- ence. Whatever they were in the earlier part of my life, that such they are now, is with me a mat- ter of every day's experience. This doctrine I once denied, and even now assert the truth of it re- specting myself only. There can he no 'peace where there is no freedom ; and he is a wretch in- deed who is a necessitarian by experience." S L A V E B Y . 397 There can be no peace where there is no free- dom ! How did this truth spring up from the deepest depth in Cowper's heart ! How it re- minds us, wrung as its expression here is from his own anguish, of those exquisitely beautiful and noble sentiments, manifestly the sincerest utter- ances of his soul, with which, in " The Task," he has denounced the curse of slavery, and celebrated freedom as man's birthright from his Creator ! "Whose freedom is by sufferance, and at will Of a superior, he is never free. "Who lives, and is not weary of a life Exposed to manacles, deserves them well, The State that strives for liberty, though foiled, And forced to abandon what she bravely sought, Deserves, at least, applause for her attempt, And pity for her loss. But that 's a cause Not often unsuccessful. Power usurped Is weakness when opposed, concious of wrong, 'Tis pusillanimous, and prone to flight ; But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought Of freedom, in that hope itself possess All that the contest calls for ; spirit, strength, The scorn of danger, and united hearts, The surest presage of the good they seek. 'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its luster and perfume ; And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil : hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science ; blinds The eyesight of discovery ; and begets In those that suffer it, a sordid mind, Bestial, a meager intellect, unfit To be the tenant of man's noble form. 39« L A 8 T L XT T 11 To N E W I 1 . The coincidences between Cowper's poetry and his letters are interesting and instructive in the extreme ; and the more so, because he never thought of them, and never repeated himself, but always wrote what was the original creation of a present experience. The last letter of his life w r as written to the dearest Christian friend he had ever known, John Newton, thanking him for his own last letter, and for a book which Newton had sent him, and which Mr. Johnson had just read to him. How sad and dark were his last words to that dear friend, whom he was just on the eve of meeting and welcoming in the rapture and glory of a world of eternal hap- piness and light ! It was April 11, 1799, and he says, " If the book afforded me any amusement, or suggested to me any reflections, they were only such as served to embitter, if possible, still more the present moment by a sad retrospect of those days when I thought myself secure of an eternity to be spent with the spirits of such men as he whose life afforded the subject of it. But I was little aware of what I had to expect, and that a storm was at hand, which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible blot out that prospect forever. Adieu, dear sir, whom in those days I called dear friend with feel- ings that justified the appellation." At this time, Cowper had just finished the final LAST ORIGINAL POEM. 8^9 revisal of his Horner, and could converse in regard to other literary undertakings., for the vigor of his mind was unabated, nor had the power of his im- agination, nor the tenderness and sensibility of his affections, been diminished by his gloom. His affectionate kinsman proposed to him to continue his poem on " The Four Ages," and accordingly he altered and added a few lines, but remarked " that it was too great a work for him to attempt in his present situation." The next day he wrote in Latin verse the poem entitled " The Ice Islands," and a few days afterward translated it into English. The day after that translation, the 20th of March, he wrote the last original poem he ever composed, those most affecting stanzas, entitled " The Cast- away," founded upon an occurrence related in Anson's Voyages, which he had remembered for many years. Obscurest night involved the sky, Th' Atlantic billows roared, When such a destined wretch as I, Wash'd headlong from on board, Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home forever left. No braver chief could Albion boast, Than he with whom he went, Nor ever ship left Albion's coast, With warmer wishes sent. He loved them both, but both in vain, Nor him beheld, nor her again. 4.0U I H | A S T A WAY. Not long beneath the whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay ; Nor soon he felt his strength decline, Or courage die away ; But waged with death a lasting strife, Supported by despair of life. He shouted : nor his friends had failed To check the vessel's course, But so the furious blast prevailed, That, pitiless perforce, They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind. Some succor yet they could afford ; And, such as storms allow, The cask, the coop, the floated cord, Delayed not to bestow ; But he (they knew) not ship, nor shore, Whate'er they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, in such a sea Alone could rescue them ; Yet bitter felt it stiU to die, Deserted, and his friends so nigh. He long survives, who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld ; And so long he, with unspent power, His destiny repelled. And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried — adieu. At length, his transient respite passed, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in every blast, Could catch the sound no more. For them, by toil subdued, he drank The stifling wave, and then he sank. a A Y '* S FABLES. 401 No poet wept him, but the page Of narrative sincere, That tells his name, his worth, his age, Is wet with Anson's tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed, Alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not, or dream, Descanting on his fate, To give the melancholy theme A more enduring date ; But misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another's case. No voice Divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone ; "When, snatched from all effectual air, TVe perished, each alone : But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. This was his last poem, and his last attempt at poetry, though, as late as January, 1800, he em- ployed himself in translating some of Gay's Fa- bles into Latin verse. The regret has often been expressed, as it was in his life-time, that his great powers should not have given to some other original poetical undertaking rather than employed for so many years in the translation of Homer. But he had accomplished enough for one poet in the com- position of " The Task/' What God sees fit to do in the discipline of the human mind by poetry, He evidently does sparingly. And, indeed, if the quantity were greater, the value would be less, and the effect would be diminished. It is like the precious metals for the coin of society ; abundance 402 cuwper's diliyiba n c e . would destroy their use. So Divine Providence in even* age limits and regulates the supply of poets and of poetry in the world. Another poem like the last might have been produced, but the effect of both together would perhaps not have been so great as that of Cowpers volume alone. When Cowper wrote " The Castaway," he was in reality, as to time, just on the verge of Heaven ; the day of his deliverance was drawing nigh. Nevertheless, up to the last hour his mind re- mained in deep, unbroken gloom. In March, the physician in Norwich being requested to see him, asked him how he felt. "Feel!" said Cowper, " I feel unutterable despair !" The 19th of April, Mr. Johnson, " apprehending that his death was near, adverted to the affliction both of body and mind which Cowper was enduring, and ventured to speak of his approaching dissolution as the signal of his deliverance. After a pause of a few mo- ments, less interrupted by the objections of his desponding relative than he had dared to hope, he proceeded to an observation more consolatory still ; namely, that in the world to which he was hasten- ing, a merciful Redeemer had prepared inexpi ble happiness for all His children, and therefore for him. To the first part of this sentence, Cowper had listened with composure ; but the concluding words were no sooner uttered, than his passionately expressed entreaties that his companion would de- ANGELIC LIGHT. 403 sist from any further observations of a similar kind, clearly proved that, though it was on the eve of being invested with angelic light, the darkness of delusion still vailed his spirit/' He died as calmly as a sleeping infant, in the afternoon of the 25th of April, 1800, and from that moment the ex- pression into which the countenance settled was observed by his loving relative "to be that of calmness and composure, mingled, as it were, with holy surprise ;" and he regarded this as an index of the last thoughts and enjoyments of his soul, in its gradual escape from the depths of that in- scrutable despair in which it had been so long shrouded. CHAPTER XXX. MISSIONARY SPEECH BY DR. DUFF. — SPHERE OF COWPER'S USEFUL- NESS. — COOPER'S OWN REVIEW OF HIS EARLY LIFE. — PROVIDENCE AND GRACE IN IT. — COWPER'S ADMIRABLE CRITICISMS. — HYMNS FOR THE PARISH CLERK. — ADVICE IN REGARD TO STUDY. It is a sweet thing to behold how the words of poets passed into the skies become the resort of Christian hearts for the utterance of their deepest and holiest feelings. This is the case, above all others, with the poetry of Watts and Cowper. How many souls have they been permitted to ac- company, and even to j^ersuade and allure to the mercy-seat, and to interpret the breathings of how many hearts in their nearest approaches to God on earth, and on the solemn verge of death, and al- most in the very entrance to Heaven ! And yet, through how much suffering, in the instance of Cowper's genius, was this great privilege accorded ! And with what ineffable delight must such beati- fled minds look down from amid their part in the anthems of Heaven, to behold assemblages of saints on earth adoring and praising GJ-od through MISSIONARY CLIMAX. 405 the instrumentality of their compositions ! We thought of Cowper, and his earthly gloom and desolation, and his rapture in the world of light and glory, on occasion of one of those vast and crowded gatherings, when the missionary Dr. Duff poured forth the fervor of his Christian eloquence. At the close of one of his last speeches in America, on occasion of the meeting of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, his mind had been wrought up to such a point of excited feeling, and climacteric agglomeration of thought, sentences and images, that by the very law of evolution he was forced to go higher and higher with each successive sentence, till an almost pain- ful feeling of wonder and anxiety was produced in almost every mind — how can he end ? how can he close ? how descend from such an elevation, or how continue his soaring ? There was but one page in one poem in the world that could have given him the means, and that was in the sixth book of " The Task '" and it was as if Cowper himself, as a guardian angel, had borne him on his wings, and lighted with him from his transcendent flight. He closed his thrilling address, and its un- rivaled climax, with those magnificent lines, One song employs all nations, and all cry, Worthy the Lamb, for He was slain for us ! The dwellers in the vales and in the rocks Shout to each other, and the mountain-tops 406 COWTEll's MINISTRY. From distant mountains catch the flying joy, Till, nation after nation taught the strain, Earth rolls the rapturous Ilosanna round I If our recollection does not mislead us, we believe the speaker repeated the last line three times, swinging his long arm at each exulting repetition, with an accompanying sweep of grandeur, Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! The effect was sublime, overwhelming, and it seemed as if the vast audience would break forth into the same shout simultaneously ! At one time, Cowper was seriously questioning whether he ought not to devote himself to the ministry of the Gospel ; but the case was soon made perfectly plain to his own mind, as indeed it was afterward to all. His sphere of labor and of usefulness had been determined by Divine Provi- dence, and the ruin of all his own schemes was just a necessary part of that discipline by which God would prepare him for the dominion he was to hold by his genius and piety in men's minds and affections. It was a much wider dominion than he ever could have gained in sacred orders ; a domin- ion over the Church which indeed he could never have obtained as a minister in and of the Church. He knew this, and sometimes playfully intimated C O W P E E * 8 ADVICE. 407 as much to Lady Hesketh, as when he heard from her that a certain duchess was interesting herself in his behalf. " Who in the world," exclaims he, " set the duchess of a-going ? But if all the Duchesses in the world were spinning, like so many whirligigs, for my benefit, I would not stop them. It is a noble thing to be a poet, it makes all the world so lively. I might have preached more sermons than even Tillotson did, and better, and the world would have been still fast asleep ; but a volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the universe in motion." Cowper sometimes thought it was his over-sensi- tive shyness that ruined him, in preventing him from succeeding at the bar. He sympathized much with his young friends Johnson and Kose, when he saw in them something of the same awk- ward timidity. The advice he gave them both was excellent, especially to Kose. " I pitied you," says he, "for the fears which deprived you of your uncle's company, and the more for having suffered so much by those fears myself. Fight against that vicious fear, for such it is, as strenuously as you can. It is the worst enemy that can attack a man destined to the forum ; — it ruined me. To associ- ate as much as possible with the most respectable company for good sense and good breeding, is, I believe, the only, at least I am sure it is the best, remedy. The society of men of pleasure will not 408 I II B 8 WING-TIME. cure it, but rather leaves us more exposed to its influence in company of better persons." The ruin of Cowper as a lawyer, politician, and man of the world, was the making of him as. a poet and a useful being, but only by the interven- tion of Divine grace. Without this, he would have been ruined indeed. And in a beautiful letter he commends the same dear young friend for his dili- gence in the study of the law. " You do well, my dear sir, to improve your opportunity ; to speak in the rural phrase, this is your sowing-time, and the sheaves you look for can never be yours, unless you make that use of it. The color of our whole life is generally such as the three or four first years in which we are our own masters, make it. Then it is that we may be said to shape our own destiny, and to treasure up for ourselves a series of future successes or disappointments. Had I employed my time as wisely as you, in a situation very sim- ilar to yours, I had never been a poet perhaps, but I might by this time have acquired a character of more importance in society, and a situation in which my friends would have been better pleased to see me. But three years misspent in an at- torney's office were almost of course followed by several more, equally misspent in the Temple, and the consequence has been, as the Italian epitaph says, Sto qui. The only use I can make of my- self now, at least the best, is to serve in terror em cowper's 'RITicism. 409 to others, when occasion may happen to offer, that they may escape (so far as my admonitions can have any weight with them) my folly and my fate. When yon feel yourself tempted to relax a little of the strictness of your present discipline, and to indulge in amusement incompatible with your future interests, think on your friend at Weston.'' Cowper's letters contain some of the finest passages ol instructive criticism in the English language. Of this character are his remarks on occasion of one of his own poetical lines having been tampered with to make it smoother. "I know," says he, " that the ears of modern verse-writers are delicate to an excess, and their readers are troubled with the same squeamishness as themselves, so that, if a line do not run as smooth as quicksilver, they are offended. A critic of the present day serves a poem as a cook serves a dead turkey, when she fastens the legs of it to a post, and draws out all the sinews. For this we may thank Pope ; but unless we could imitate him in the eluson-. ss and compactness of his expression, as well as in the smoothness of his numbers, we had better drop the imitation, which serves no other purpose than to emasculate and weaken all we write. Give me a manly, rough line, with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing but their oilv smoothness to recommend them." IS 410 GOOD SENSE A X D SIMPLICITY. " There is a roughness on a plum which nobody that understands fruit would rub off, though the plum would be much more polished without it. I wish you to guard me from all such meddling ; as- suring you that I always write as smoothly as I can, but that I never did, never will, sacrifice the spirit or sense of a passage to the sound of it." The power and charm of Cowper's good sense and simplicity, as well as tenderness of feeling, in his poetry, were acknowledged in a very unexpected way, when the clerk of All-Saints' parish in North- hampton came to him with a renewed application for the annual mortuary stanzas to be printed with his Bill of Mortality at Christmas. Gowper told him there must be plenty of poets at Northhamp- ton, and referred him in particular to his name- sake Mr. Cox, the statuary, as a successful wooer of the Muse. The clerk made answer that all this was very true, and he had already borrowed help from him. " But, alas ! sir, Mr. Cox is a gentleman of much reading, and the people of our town do not well understand him. He has written for me, but nine in ten of us were stone-blind to his meaning." Cowper felt all the force of this equivocal compliment ; his mortified vanity came near refusing, if the merit of his own verses was considered as insured by the smallness of his read- ing. But rinding that the poor clerk had walked over to Weston on purpose to implore his assist- MORTUARY VERSES. 411 ance, and was in considerable distress, he good- naturedly consented, and supplied the clerk's Mor- tality Bill with his beautiful verses for several years ; a fig for the poets, said he, who write epitaphs upon individuals t I have written one that serves two hundred persons. Among these productions is to be found the beautiful dirge, be- ginning, Thankless for favors from on high, Man thinks he fades too soon; Though 'tis his privilege to die, "Would he improve the boon. The last verse in this poem is truly sublime ; and it is one of the most perfect stanzas, taking into consideration the greatness and compactness of thought expressed, and the dignity and simplicity of the expression, that even Cowper ever wote. 'Tis judgment shakes him : there 's the fear, That prompts the wish to stay ; He has incurred a long arrear, And must despair to pay. Pay ? follow Christ, and all is paid; His death your peace insures ; Think on the grave where He was laid, And calm descend to yours. Another of these pieces is that beginning, most delightful hour by man Experienced here below, The hour that terminates his span, His folly and his woe ! 412 CRITICAL APOTHEQMB. That also beginning, He lives, who lives to God alone, And all are dead beside ; For other source than God is none, "Whence life can be supplied. This last was composed in 1793 ; and it is some- what strange that the critics who deemed it so hazardous to the verge of insanity for Cowper to have been engaged by Newton in composing the Olney Hymns, should not have fallen upon poor John Cox, the parish clerk of Northhampton, for the pertinacity with which he- enlisted the genius and the heart of the poet again in so dangerous an undertaking. One of Cowper's apothegms to his young friend and kinsman Mr. Johnson, deserves quoting, be- cause, although simplicity and perspicuity were in Cowper the intuition and native element of his genius, yet he also made it a principle, both of intellect and conscience. "Remember," said he, " that in writing, perspicuity is always more than half the battle ; the want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A mean- ing that does not stare you in the face, is as bad as no meaning, because nobody will take the pains to poke for it." We may add here the admirable advice given by Cowper in another letter to the same young cowper's theology. 413 friend, in regard to his course of study. " Life is too short to afford time even for serious trifles. Pursue what you know to be attainable, make truth your object, and your studies will make you a wise man. /Let your divinity, if I may advise, be the divinity of the glorious Reformation : I mean in contradiction to Arminianism, and all the isms that ever were broached in this world of error and ignorance. The divinity of the Reforma- tion is called Calvinism, but injuriously. It has been that of the Church of Christ in all ages. It is the divinity of St. Paul, and of St. Paul's Mas- ter, who met him in his way to Damascus." Cowper's own religious views, as well as New- ton's, were what are called Calvinistic ; but he meant that any nomenclature except that of Christ, given to the divinity of the Reformation, was injurious. That divinity rose above all names, went back of all Churches, and was taken imme- diately from the Scriptures. What Cowper practiced in himself, and what grew out of the very instinct and life of his char- acter, he loved in others. He told Newton that he preferred his style as a historian (referring to Newton's excellent work on the early history of the Church) to that of the two most renowned writers of history the present day has seen. He referred not to Hume, whose style was more sim- ple, and whose volumes were not then all pub- 414 hayley's friendship. lished, but to Robertson and Gibbon. He gave bis reasons for this preference, with his own point and beauty. | < ; In your style I see no affectation, in every line of theirs I see nothing else. They disgust me always ; Robertson with his pomp and his strut, and Gibbon with his finical and French manners. You are as correct as they. You ex- press yourself with as much precision. Your words are arranged with as much propriety, but you do not set your periods to a tune. They dis- cover a perpetual desire to exhibit themselves to advantage, whereas your subject engrosses you. They sing, and you say ; which, as history is a thing to be said and not sung, is in my judgment very much to your advantage. A writer that de- spises their tricks, and is yet neither inelegant nor inharmonious, proves himself, by that single cir- cumstance, a man of superior judgment and ability to them both. You have my reasons. I honor a manly character, in which good sense and a desire of doing good are the predominant feat- ures ; but affectation is an emetic." ) Hayley, one of the dearest friends, and the first biographer of Cowper, has connected his own fame with that of the poet by this friendship. It gives him an immortality which his own poetical works, though of no little excellence, could not have secured for him. His admiration and love of Cowper were heartfelt and unbounded ; but he did not exag- A stranger's love. 415 gerate when he pronounced " The Task," " taken all together, perhaps the most attractive poem that was ever produced, and such as required the rarest assemblage of truly poetical powers for its production/' " Sweet bard!" exclaimed one of Hayley's correspondents, who never had enjoyed the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with the poet, but whose heart was inspired with the deepest Christian affection, contemplating Cowper's por- trait by Lawrence : ' Sweet bard I with whom iu sympathy of choice I 've ofttimes left the world at nature's voice, To join the song that all her creatures raise, To carol forth their great Creator's praise ; Or wrapt in visions of immortal day, Have gazed on Truth in Zion's heavenly way ; Sweet bard, may this thine image, all I know, Or ever may, of Cowper's form below. Teach one, who views it with a Christian's love, To seek and find thee in the realms above I" THE END. I /