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them, because he knew not the Lord himself. He desired and hoped to recover, that he might yet be faithful, and be an instrument of good to others. He said to his brother, "Brother, I was going to say I was born in such a year; but I correct myself—I would rather say, in such a year I came into the world. You know when I was born." The loss of a brother so inexpressibly dear, at the very moment when he had begun to live, and could fully sympathise with Cowper in all his Christian feelings, would have been an overwhelming sorrow, but for the greatness of the grace attending it. The deep extraordinary experience of Divine mercy in so peaceful and happy a death, confirmed Cowper in his own faith and hope, and prevented the disastrous effect which so great an affliction might otherwise have had upon his mental frame and nervous system. He continued the performance and enjoyment of his spiritual duties, and went on in the composition of the "Olney Hymns." His letters had long breathed a sweet spirit of piety and of affectionate solicitude for others, that they might enjoy the same heavenly hope with himself. And yet at this very time the period was near when the dreadful malady which had carried him to the insane asylum at St Albans, would again seize upon his being, and mind and heart would be involved for a season in the blackness of darkness.

And here we note that if it had not been for the rich and sweet experience of God's loving-kindness in these years of light and peace that, in Huntingdon and Olney, in the Christian society of the Unwins and of Newton, had passed so pleasantly, the dread incursion of his madness would utterly have overwhelmed him, and he must have

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passed into absolute incurable despair. But during those years of such heavenly Christian enjoyment and frequently unclouded light, God was preparing him for a long and dreary conflict, and at the same time providing for the exercise and development of his genius. In those years, more than in all the rest of his life, he gained that rich spiritual wisdom, that experimental knowledge of divine truth, that acquaintance with the human heart, as touched by divine grace, that affectionate sympathy with and knowledge of the woes of other hearts, and that habit of submissive acquiescence with the will of God, which prepared him to write such a poem as "The Task."

Yet Southey dares to intimate-concerning the Christian experience of Cowper in these delightful years, and especially the happiness of his first recovery-that it was merely the illusion of his madness, which ought to have been discouraged. He sets it down (as we have seen) as a perilous religious enthusiasm, and rebukes the religious friends of Cowper for confirming him in the belief that there was any thing supernatural in his cure. But certainly it would have been strange comfort, and as dangerous as strange, to tell the victim of religious despair, in the first happiness of a sight of the Redeemer, and the first enjoyment of a serene hope, that the happiness and the hope were both illusive, and that the raptures of a recovery, if deemed real, would only be productive of the perilous consequences of religious enthusiasm. In this and some other passages, Southey goes far toward the hazardous intimation that Cowper's religious experience, instead of being the work of the Spirit of God, was only

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another form of his insanity, or the confounding of bodily sensations with spiritual impressions.

Now, if Southey could study such a manifestation of grace and truth in Christ Jesus as that revealed and recorded in the lives of such men as Newton and Cowper, and, we may add, the German convert Van Lier (whose account of his own Christian experience Cowper translated from the Latin), and yet deliberately sneer at such experience, calling it the "Torrid Zone," and maintaining a mind and heart all the way blinded to the interpositions of grace, divine and supernatural, it is one of the most extraordinary cases of unbelief and darkness ever known. If Southey's mind, while rational, was in that state of scepticism, his madness was infinitely worse than Cowper's. We know not what to make of the tone, half devout, half sneering, that marks a portion of the life of the Christian poet. But Southey had also called the experience of Bunyan himself, in one stage of it, a burning and feverish enthusiasm. He seems to have prided himself in the assumption of a much better understanding of Cowper's malady, than Newton and Mrs Unwin, Cowper's dearest friends and guardians, possessed; but of its cure, as divine and supernatural, he seems to have believed or understood little or nothing. He appears like a Rationalistic theologian, or Neologian, writing commentaries on an experimental process of grace, of which he does not credit the existence.

Yet, in the purest and serenest light, both of reason and of faith, Cowper himself was so fully persuaded that his recovery at St Albans, and his happiness afterward,

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had come from God and his grace; he knew this, with such perfect assurance, by the Spirit of God bearing witness with his own spirit, that even in a subsequent access of his malady, and under the depths of what seemed the darkness of absolute despair, he declared that it was not in the power of the arch-enemy himself to deprive him of that conviction. At a late period of his life, Cowper made, in one of his letters, a striking remark, which he little knew was to become applicable (with what force and beauty!) to some of his own biographers. "The quarrel that the world has," said he, "with evangelic men and doctrines, they would have with a host of angels in the human form. For it is the quarrel of owls with sunshine; of ignorance with divine illumination."

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CHAPTER XIII.

Recurrence of Cowper's malady-Its continuance for seven years-His gradual return to literary effort, and his enjoyment in the composition of his poetry.

THE threatened access of his malady came with great suddenness in the month of January 1773. A dim mysterious presentiment of it took possession of his soul in one of his solitary field-walks in the country, and he returned home and composed the last of the hymns contributed by him to the Olney Collection, and one of the most exquisitely beautiful and instructive among them all, "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." That holy and admirable composition was the only effort of his genius for nearly seven years, during which period, or the greater part of it, he was in the profoundest dejection of spirits, and sometimes in a state amounting to paroxyms of despair. Some years afterward, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, he described his condition under that attack, as follows:

"In the year 1773, the same scene that was acted at St Albans opened upon me again at Olney, only covered with a still deeper shade of melancholy, and ordained to be of much longer duration. I was suddenly reduced from my wonted state of understanding to an almost childish im