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MYSTERY OF COWPER'S MALADY.

CHAPTER IX.

Mystery and meaning of the Divine discipline with Cowper-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 impenetrable 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 personal 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 interest in the study of his biography; an investigation 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

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have made a good motto for his poem of "Retirement"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 It might be applied to Cowper's whole life, withdrawn by Divine Providence from the busy world, but especially to that part of it so sweetly hid with Christ in God, when Cowper first fled from the world and abode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 prepare 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 infix'd
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 heal'd, and bade me live.

Since then, with few associates, in remote
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

Ah! what is life, thus spent? and what are they,
But frantic, who thus spend it, all for smoke?
Eternity for bubbles proves at last

A senseless bargain. When I see such games
Play'd by the creatures of a Power who swears
That He will judge the earth, and call the fool
To a sharp reckoning that has lived in vain :
And when I weigh their seeming wisdom well,
And prove it in the infallible result

So hollow and so false, I feel my heart
Dissolve in pity, and account the learn'd,
If this be learning, most of all deceived.

Great crimes alarm the conscience, but it sleeps,
While thoughtful man is plausibly amused.
Defend me, therefore, common sense, say I,
From reveries so airy, from the toil

Of dropping buckets into empty wells,

And growing old in drawing nothing up."

We derive the materials for this continued investigation from Cowper himself. Up to the period of his recovery from the first attack of madness, and the time of his serene and happy settlement in Huntingdon, we have his own life, and the movements of his mind and heart, recorded by himself with a good degree of minuteness, and a faithful, unsparing severity of moral self-judgment. From that period to the second access of mental disorder and profound gloom, we have his own letters, the Olney Hymns, and that very important development of his life unintentionally afforded in his own deeply interesting and affecting

memoir of the life, conversion, and death of his beloved brother at Cambridge. The autobiography, in which the whole and only correct account of his first insanity is contained, with all that led to it, and all that followed it, forms one of the most thrilling, instructive, and valuable pieces of a similar nature, next to Bunyan's "Grace Abounding," to be found in the English language. Indeed, in some respects it is even more wonderful than that, and equally precious as a record of the grace of God. It was written by Cowper in an interval of clear light, in the enjoyment of the presence of the Saviour, in the serenest peace of mind, in the exercise of an unclouded judgment passing sentence on the transactions that rose before his memory.

It is the only revelation of the dealings of Divine providence and grace, the only solution of otherwise unmingled, insolvable mysteries or contradictions. Neglecting or

concealing that revelation, men have attempted to charge Cowper's lunacy of mind upon what they have called the gloom or fanaticism of his evangelical belief and experience. But the autobiography and the letters, instead of throwing the blame of his madness on the type or the fervour of his religion, cast that burden wholly and distinctly on his state of prayerlessness, impenitence, unbelief, and alienation from God, and present his religious experience as the only cure of his mental malady, the only lasting relief from his misery and darkness. They shew that religious anxiety had nothing to do with exciting Cowper's derangement, or producing it at its origin, or exasperating it when developed; but, on the contrary, that the suicidal despair, which was the result of a complication of dis

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COWPER.

tresses of mind, heart, sensibilities, and nervous system, from which all religious impressions were absolutely excluded, was itself, when God had spared his life, the overruled and merciful occasion of his first salutary, deep conviction of sin; was indeed the cause of an entire change in the position of his being, such a change as brought him at length to a calm, submissive resting on the bosom of his Saviour, a release from darkness into the light of heaven, and a serene enjoyment and exercise both of reason and of faith.

Now this whole account was for a long time unknown, unpublished, hidden. Some men were aware of its existence, but Cowper's own biographers ignored it, and preferred to leave the subject of his madness enveloped in a mystery that permitted those who hated evangelical truth and piety to set it down to the score of religious fanaticism and bigotry. Others contradicted it, and refused to take the testimony of Cowper himself as to the character of his unregenerate life, as to the absolute irreligion of the whole of it, until there ensued the mighty change in his feelings and habits wrought by Divine grace. They could not bear to relinquish Cowper's exquisite mind and nature as having needed any supernatural influence to constitute it a Christian nature, or as having really been the subject of that vulgar fanatical experience called conversion. They projected the idea of the interesting, timid, sensitive being, whom they had known only through his poetry, or the wide circle of his admiring friends, back upon the period of his early life; and they scorned the thought of such a want of charity as to suppose that such an innocent being could, in his right mind, have accused himself of deserving