9. The decade from 1780 to 1790 had been the happiest and most fruitful period of Cowper's life. In 1790, he formed the acquaintance of a second cousin, John Johnson-then an undergraduate at Cambridge, afterwards Rector of Dereham, in Norfolk. HOMER was published in 1791. Most people find it dull; but it contains some passages of real beauty and of perfect English. “Where is the man who has ever read it?" was the exclamation of a thoughtful critic not long ago. In the winter of 1788, Mrs. Unwin had had a stroke of paralysis; and the effect upon Cowper's spirits was necessarily severe. His insanity took a new form. He thought he heard voices speaking to him when he woke in the morning; and a schoolmaster at Olney, Samuel Teedon, a conceited and ignorant impostor, affirmed that he could interpret these voices. Whole volumes were filled with the words and gibberish; and nothing whatever was done until Mr. Teedon had given his authoritative interpretation. A diversion was produced by the visit of a friend, Hayley—then esteemed a great poet, but whose works are now never read. Mrs. Unwin had a second attack of paralysis in 1791; and, after her recovery, they visited Hayley at his country-seat at Sussex. On their return to Weston, Mrs. Unwin got worse; and Cowper became more miserable and more under the domination of Teedon, who made more money out of his infirmities than ever. The picture of their domestic life is heart-breaking. Mrs. Unwin sat silent for days, gazing into the fire, unable to work or read; sometimes talking nonsense, sometimes bursting into uncouth laughter; and, if Cowper attempted to do anything, she showed so much irritability that he was obliged to desist. This was for months the only "conversation " that went on in his house. "I seem to myself," he writes to Mr. Newton, "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. Thus I have spent twenty years." He thought that God had finally forsaken him, and had cast him off. In the beginning of 1794, he had another attack. He spent his time walking backwards and forwards in his bedroom, believing from hour to hour, that an evil spirit was coming to fetch him away. In the midst of this despair and terror, a letter arrived from Lord Spencer that the king had granted Cowper a pension of £300 a year; but it was too late: he did not even understand the news. Mr. Johnson was sent for, and urged his removal. The two poor creatures were taken to 66 Dereham Lodge, Swaffham, in Norfolk. They then removed to East Dereham, where Mrs. Unwin died in December, 1796. She was buried by torchlight, so that Cowper might not know the time of her funeral. A deeper gloom than ever settled down upon him. 'Nothing was of any use," he said; and, though he could work and write a little, he was never seen to smile again. In February, 1800, he was seized with dropsy; a physician was called in; he asked him how he felt; "I feel unutterable despair," was all that Cowper could reply. Mr. Johnson spoke to him of the love of God; he passionately entreated that such words should never again be spoken in his hearing, He was offered a cordial on his deathbed. "What can it signify ?" and he put it aside. These were his last words. His last poem was The Castaway. An account in the newspapers of a poor sailor who had spent some days on a piece of wreck in mid-ocean, and had perished just when he was going to be rescued, had struck him; and he found a gloomy pleasure in comparing his own fate with this. No voice divine the storm allayed No light propitious shone, When, snatched from all effectual aid, But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. "From that moment," Mr. So he died, at five o'clock in the evening of the 25th of April, 1800, in the blackest darkness of mind. Johnson writes, "until the coffin was closed, the expression into which his countenance had settled was that of calmness and composure, mingled with holy surprise." God's mercy is from everlasting unto everlasting; and his truth endures for ever. 10. His greatest work is THE TASK; and the best poem in that work is The Winter Evening. He is said to be the best letter-writer in the language. His only rival is Horace Walpole; but in true humour and genuine originality he far surpasses him.* His style is "The complete letter-writer," says Mr. Bagehot, "is now an unknown animal. In the last century, when communications were difficult, and epistles rare, there were a great many valuable people who devoted a good deal of time to writing elaborate letters. You wrote letters to a man whom you knew nineteen years and a half ago, and told him what you had for dinner, and what your second cousin said, and how the crops got on. Every detail of life was described, and dwelt on, and improved. Sir Walter Scott says he knew a man who remembered that the London post-bag once came to Edinburgh with only one letter in it." Y ! the reflex of his character. He was an honest English gentleman with a true and healthy taste, fine moderation, genuine good-sense, and a good deal of humour; well-bred, pure-minded, sincere, and affectionate. He could attack systems and opinions with sarcastic vigour; but he always felt kindly to persons when he came to know them. He could not hate; it was pain to him to hear of worldly hardness or of harsh words; he was true in his friendships, and ready to forgive a slight or injury in a moment. Mrs. Browning writes: O poets! from a maniac's tongue, was poured the deathless singing! But the words poured and singing give a somewhat erroneous view of Cowper's manner of writing; there was nothing lyrical about him. He was more of a Teacher than a Bard. He took to writing, not because there was a burden upon him, or an eager desire to express his feelings, but from amusement. He states that he always wrote verses when violently moved by any domestic or political incident; and that his prose, in such circumstance, was apt to be verbose, inflated, and disgusting." Cowper was not "smit with the love of sacred song," he was attracted by it; he does not stand in the first rank of poets, but he stands high in the second rank. In his poem Retirement he says: 66 4 Forgery of fancy, and a dream of woes; Man is a harp whose chords elude 5 the sight, Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose ; Nor view of water turning busy mills, 7 Parks in which Art preceptress Nature weds, Nor gardens interspersed with flowery beds, Nor gales that catch the scent of blooming groves, Can call up life into the faded eye 8 That passes all he sees unheeded by: No wounds like those a wounded spirit feels; 9 No care for such, till God, who makes them, heals. The above is a fair specimen of his "earlier manner; " and it is, like all Cowper's writing, plain sense delivered in clear and manly English. Cowper, in a letter to Mr. John Johnson, says :-" Remember 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 meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning, because nobody will take the pains to grope for it." There can be no doubt that Cowper acted upon his own advice, and that he took as much pains to make his meaning clear, as some modern poets take to make theirs difficult and obscure. "The nice conduct of a clouded " style Cowper could not and would not understand.-Every now and then he drops into common-place or the prosaic. He is best when he is writing about home and the quiet delights of home. He is never vague, or indistinct, or untrue; and he never writes at second-hand. His description of scenery is more like a series of photographs than a landscape by an imaginative artist; but it is always fresh and true. His rhymes are often bad; and he evidently thought it sufficient to rhyme only to the eye. Thus he has death, beneath; fled, speed; shapes, relapse; and prey, sea. 11. In the history of English Literature, Cowper marks the reaction against the hitherto universal influence of Pope. He says of Pope, But he (his musical finesse was such, And every warbler has his tune by heart. Cowper did not make Pope a model, but a beacon. Pope was always more or less artificial; Cowper, in his earnest endeavour to be natural and sincere, is sometimes prosaic. Pope employs a secondhand vocabulary; Cowper, speaking only of what he knows, uses the simplest and aptest words. Pope had taught his readers to manufacture a poem by recipe. To compose an ode, take a lark or an eagle, add a few flowers, a moss-grown cell, brown forests, reddening Phoebus, and any other stock poetical properties you please. Cowper ridicules this fashion in a mock poem: The lark shall soar in every Ode With flowers of light description strewed: While every cell's o'ergrown with moss: There mouldering stones o'erspread the rugged ground. There bubbling fonts, and prattling rills. The virtues of truthfulness and sincerity are never wanting in Cowper. The reaction, begun by Cowper, was completed by Words. worth. The following is a specimen of Cowper's later manner: WINTER. 1 Oh Winter! ruler of the inverted 1 year, Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled, A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along its slippery way, I love thee, all unlovely as thou seemest, And dreaded as thou art. Thou hold'st the sun Shortening his journey between morn and noon,3 |