his assistance in writing a volume of hymns, but his morbid melancholy gained ground, and in 1773 it became a case of decided insanity. About two years were passed in this unhappy state. On his recovery, Cowper took to gardening, rearing hares, drawing landscapes, and composing poetry. The latter was fortunately the most permanent enjoyment; and its fruits appeared in a volume of poems published in 1782. The sale of the work was slow; but his friends were eager in its praise, and it received the approbation of Johnson and Franklin. His correspondence was resumed, and cheerfulness again became an inmate of his retreat at Olney. This happy change was augmented by the presence of a third party, Lady Austen, a widow, who came to reside in the immediate neighbourhood of Olney, and whose conversation for a time charmed away the melancholy spirit of Cowper. She told him the story of John Gilpin, and the famous horseman and his feats were an inexhaustible source of merriment.' Lady Austen also prevailed upon the poet to try his powers in blank verse, and from her suggestion sprung the noble poem of The Task. This memorable friendship was at length dissolved. The lady exacted too much of the time and attention of the poet-perhaps a shade of jealousy on the part of Mrs Unwin, with respect to the superior charms and attractions of her rival, intervened to increase the alienation-and before the Task was finished, its fair inspirer had left Olney without any intention of returning to it. In 1785 the new volume was published. Its success was instant and decided. The public were glad to hear the true voice of poetry and of nature, and in the rural descriptions and fireside scenes of the Task, they saw the features of English scenery and domestic life faithfully delineated. The Task,' says Southey,' was at once descriptive, moral, and satirical. The descriptive parts everywhere bore evidence of a thoughtful mind and a gentle spirit, as well as of an observant eye; and the moral sentiment which pervaded them gave a charm in which descriptive poetry is often found wanting. The best didactic poems, when compared with the Task, are like formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery.' As soon as he had completed his labours for the publication of his second volume, Cowper entered upon an undertaking of a still more arduous nature-a translation of Homer. He had gone through the great Grecian at Westminster school, and afterwards read him critically in the Temple, and he was impressed with but a poor opinion of the translation of Pope. Setting himself to a daily task of forty lines, he at length accomplished the forty thousand verses. He published by subscription, in which his friends were generously active. The work appeared in 1791, in two volumes quarto. In the interval the poet and Mrs Unwin had removed to Weston, a beautiful village about a mile from Olney. His cousin, Lady Hesketh, a woman of refined and fascinating manners, had visited him; he had also formed a friendly intimacy with the family of the Throckmortons, to whom Weston belonged, and his circumstances were comparatively easy. His malady, however, returned upon him with full force, and Mrs Unwin being rendered helpless by palsy, the task of nursing her fell upon the sensitive and dejected poet. A careful revision of his Homer, and an engagement to edit a new edition of Milton, were the last literary undertakings of Cowper. The former he completed, but without improving the first edition: his second task was never finished. A deepening gloom settled on his mind, with occasionally bright intervals. A visit to his friend Hayley, at Eartham, produced a short cessation of his mental suffering, and in 1794 a pension of £300 was granted to him from the crown. He was induced, in 1795, to remove with Mrs Unwin to Norfolk, on a visit to some relations, and there Mrs Unwin died on the 17th December 1796. The unhappy poet would not believe that his long tried friend was actually dead; he went to see the body, and on witnessing the unaltered placidity of death, flung himself to the other side of the room with a passionate expression of feeling, and from that time he never mentioned her name nor spoke of her again. He lingered on for more than three years, still under the same dark shadow of religious despondency and terror, but occasionally writing, and listening attentively to works read to him by his friends. His last poem was the Castaway, a strain of touching and beautiful verse, which showed no decay of his poetical powers: at length death came to his release on the 25th of April 1800. So sad and strange a destiny has never before or since been that of a man of genius. With wit and humour at will, he was nearly all his life plunged in the darkest melancholy. Innocent, pious, and confiding, he lived in perpetual dread of everlasting punishment: he could only see between him and heaven a high wall which he despaired of ever being able to scale; yet his intellectual vigour was not subdued by affliction. What he wrote for amusement or relief in the midst of 'supreme distress,' surpasses the elaborate efforts of others made under the most favourable circumstances; and in the very winter of his days, his fancy was as fresh and blooming as in the spring and morning of existence. That he was constitutionally prone to melancholy and insanity, seems undoubted; but the predisposing causes were as surely aggravated by his strict and secluded mode of life. Lady Hesketh was a better guide and companion than John Newton; and no one can read his letters without observing that cheerfulness was inspired by the one, and terror by the other. The iron frame of Newton could stand unmoved amidst shocks that destroyed the shrinking and apprehensive mind of Cowper. All, however, have now gone to their account-the stern yet kind minister, the faithful Mary Unwin, the gentle high-born relations who forsook ease, and luxury, and society to soothe the misery of one wretched being, and that immortal being himself has passed away, scarce conscious that he had bequeathed an imperishable treasure to mankind. We have greater and loftier poets than Cowper, but none so entirely incorporated, as it were, with our daily existence-none so completely a friend our companion in woodland wanderings, and in moments of serious thought-ever gentle and affectionate, even in his transient fits of ascetic gloom-a pure mirror of affections, regrets, feelings, and desires which we have all felt or would wish to cherish. Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, are spirits of ethereal kind: Cowper is a steady and valuable friend, whose society we may sometimes neglect for that of more splendid and attractive associates, but whose unwavering principle and purity of character, joined to rich intellectual powers, overflow upon us in secret, and bind us to him for ever. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Cowper's first volume was coldly received. The subjects of his poems (Table Talk, the Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, &c.) did not promise much, and his manner of handling them was not calculated to conciliate a fastidious public. He was both too harsh and too spiritual for general readers. Johnson had written moral poems in the same form of verse, but they possessed a rich declamatory grandeur and brilliancy of illustration which Cowper did not attempt, and probably would, from principle, have rejected. There are passages, however, in these evangelical works of Cowper of masterly execution and lively fancy. His character of Chatham has rarely been surpassed, even by Pope or Dryden : A. Patriots, alas! the few that have been found Where most they flourish, upon English ground, The country's need have scantily supplied; And the last left the scene when Chatham died. B. Not so; the virtue still adorns our age, Though the chief actor died upon the stage. In him Demosthenes was heard again; Liberty taught him her Athenian strain; She clothed him with authority and awe, Spoke from his lips, and in his looks gave law. His speech, his form, his action full of grace, And all his country beaming in his face, He stood as some inimitable hand Would strive to make a Paul or Tully stand. No sycophant or slave that dared oppose Her sacred cause, but trembled when he rose ; And every venal stickler for the yoke, Felt himself crushed at the first word he spoke. Neither has the fine simile with which the following retrospect closes : Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appeared, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard; To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth asked ages more. Thus genius rose and set at ordered times, And shot a day-spring into distant climes, Ennobling every region that he chose. He sunk in Greece, in Italy he rose ; And, tedious years of Gothic darkness past, Emerged all splendour in our isle at last. Thus lovely halcyons dive into the main, Then show far off their shining plumes again. The poem of Conversation in this volume is rich in Addisonian humour and satire, and formed no unworthy prelude to the Task. In Hope and Retirement, we see traces of the descriptive powers and natural pleasantry afterwards so finely developed. The highest flight in the whole, and the one most characteristic of Cowper, is his sketch of [The Greenland Missionaries.] That sound bespeaks salvation on her way, Oh blessed within the enclosure of your rocks, In this mixture of argument and piety, poetry and plain sense, we have the distinctive traits of Cowper's genius. The freedom acquired by composition, and especially the presence of Lady Austen, led to more valuable results; and when he entered upon the Task, he was far more disposed to look at the sunny side of things, and to launch into general description. His versification underwent a similar improvement. His former poems were often rugged in style and expression, and were made so on purpose, to avoid the polished uniformity of Pope and his imitators. He was now sensible that he had erred on the opposite side, and accordingly the Task was made to unite strength and freedom with elegance and harmony. No poet has introduced so much idiomatic expression into a grave poem of blank verse; but the higher passages are all carefully finished, and rise or fall, according to the nature of the subject, with inimitable grace and melody. In this respect Cowper, as already mentioned, has greatly the advantage of Thomson, whose stately march is never relaxed, however trivial be the theme. The variety of the Task in style and manner, no less than in subject, is one of its greatest charms. The mock-heroic opening is a fine specimen of his humour, and from this he slides into rural description and moral reflection so naturally and easily, that the reader is carried along apparently without an effort. The scenery of the Ouse-its level plains and spacious meads-is described with the vividness of painting, and the poet then elevates the character of his picture by a the vale of years;' his playful satire and tender rapid sketch of still nobler features: [Rural Sounds.] Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, The tone of languid nature. Mighty winds [The Diversified Character of Creation.] The earth was made so various, that the mind From the beginning to the end of the Task we never lose sight of the author. His love of country rambles, when a boy, O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink; his walks with Mrs Unwin, when he had exchanged the Thames for the Ouse, and had grown sober in admonition, his denunciation of slavery, his noble patriotism, his devotional earnestness and sublimity, his warm sympathy with his fellow-men, and his exquisite paintings of domestic peace and happiness, are all so much self-portraiture, drawn with the ripe skill and taste of the master, yet with a modesty that shrinks from the least obtrusiveness and display. The very rapidity of his transitions, where things light and sportive are drawn up with the most solemn truths, and satire, pathos, and reproof alternately mingle or repel each other, are characteristic of his mind and temperament in ordinary life. His inimitable ease and colloquial freedom, which lends such a charm to his letters, is never long absent from his poetry; and his peculiar tastes, as seen in that somewhat grandiloquent line, Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too, are all pictured in the pure and lucid pages of the Task. It cannot be said that Cowper ever abandoned his sectarian religious tenets, yet they are little seen in his great work. His piety is that which all should feel and venerate; and if his sad experience of the world had tinged the prospect of. life, its fluctuations and its vast concerns,' with a deeper shade than seems consonant with the general welfare and happiness, it also imparted a higher authority and more impressive wisdom to his earnest and solemn appeals. He was a stricken deer that left the herd,' conscious of the follies and wants of those he left behind, and inspired with power to minister to the delight and instruction of the whole human race. [From Conversation."] The emphatic speaker dearly loves to oppose, A tasteless journal of the day before. A graver coxcomb we may sometimes see, A doctor's trouble, but without the fees; Now the distemper, spite of draught or pill, May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting sound shall pass my lips no more! Thy maidens grieved themselves at my concern, gave me promise of a quick return: Oft They thought they must have died, they were so bad, What ardently I wished I long believed, Their peevish hearers almost wish they had. Some fretful tempers wince at every touch, That's worse, the drone-pipe of a humble bee. He likes yours little and his own still less; I pity bashful men, who feel the pain The fear of being silent makes us mute. On the Receipt of his Mother's Picture. Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed I will obey, not willingly alone, A momentary dream, that thou art she. My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journey just begun? Perhaps thou gavest me, though unseen, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in blissAh, that maternal smile! it answers-Yes. I heard the bell tolled 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. And, disappointed still, was still deceived; Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed here. I pricked them into paper with a pin, Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast But higher far my proud pretensions rise- [Voltaire and the Lace-worker.] Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door, News from all nations lumbering at his back. Is to conduct it to the destined inn; Fast as the periods from his fluent quill, Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains, His horse and him, unconscious of them all. |