COWPER'S HAPPY EXPERIENCE.

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CHAPTER XXI.

Cowper's happy experience-His religious enjoyment of nature-Genius and humility-Danger and discipline-Self-knowledge in the furnace-Malady in 1787.

It was with an eye and heart thus blissfully enlightened 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 human heart, he had drawn all from experience, and nothing from second-hand, we can not but personify the author when we read those exquisite passages 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 Nature as his Father'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. Notwithstanding 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 exclaim, when gazing forth

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THE SPELL BROKEN.

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-tormenting 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 shew like beacons in the blue abyss,
Ordain'd 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 experience 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 touch'd them; 'tis the voice of song,

COWPER ON THE MOUNT AND IN THE VALLEY.

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 bless'd moment, Nature throwing wide
Her veil 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 centre of all minds,
Thou only point of rest, Eternal Word!
From Thee departing, they are lost, and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace.
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man,
His high endeavour and his glad success,
His strength to suffer and his will to serve.
But, O 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!"

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One may say with perfect truth, that if all Cowper's sufferings had taught, or enabled him to write, only those two last lines; yet, teaching him that, as his own deep experience, they were well endured, they were infinitely precious. Nevertheless, 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 illustration 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

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COWPER ON THE MOUNT AND IN THE VALLEY.

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, commissioned of God to help him through his sufferings, 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 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 distress, he felt as though the very last dregs of that passion had been wrung out from him, as though the applauses 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 Hesketh, 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 shew 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

COWPER ON THE MOUNT AND IN THE VALLEY.

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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 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 admiration 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 despise it. Praise belongeth to God; and I seem to myself to covet it no more than I covet Divine honours. 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 reduced 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 acquired since.

"Self is a subject of inscrutable misery and mischief, and can never be studied to so much advantage as in the dark; for as the bright beams of the sun seem to impart