to turn to more serious things, how much the pathetic stanzas To Mary would gain in poignant realism if we came upon them immediately after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his remorse for the strain his malady had imposed upon her. A still more striking example would be the lines written On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture. By a literary tradition these are reckoned among the most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how often to-day are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears have fallen on that page for many a long year. Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed Short-lived possession! but the record fair, A thousand other themes less deeply traced. Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid ; The biscuit or confectionary plum: The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed: do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes, to stand like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own susceptibility? And that confectionary plum-somehow the savour of it has long ago evaporated. Even the closing lines Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost, Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this allowance that association with the letters would afford; the mind would pass without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs. Bodham-all of it a model of simple beauty: The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a multitude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression. To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something more than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful editor; it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I had almost said of self-respect, which we find it so difficult to impress on our broken modern style. Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of Cowper's prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be thankful for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the correspondence, and take the occasion to look a little more closely into one of the strangest and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper was born at Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of the parish, belonged to a family of high connections, and his mother, Anne Donne, was also of noble lineage, claiming descent through four different lines from Henry III. The fact is of some importance, for the son was very much the traditional gentleman, and showed the pride of race both in his language and manners. He himself affected to think more of his kinship to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his other forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability of his temper and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of St. Paul's." It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the responsibility for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we call life is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of life spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and an awful echo of the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's nerves. But that is not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to have been highspirited and natural. At Westminster School he passed under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was to translate in after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most influential in forming his poetical manner. I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid. He was so good-natured, and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person. ber seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put it out again. I remem After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and then came to Lon 1 In a newly published volume of the letters of William Bodham Donne (the friend of Edward FitzGerald and Bernard Barton), the editor, Catharine B. Johnson, throws doubt on this supposed descent of Cowper's mother from the Poet Dean. don under the pretext of studying law, living first with an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in the Middle Temple. Life went merrily for while. He was a fellow student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds, "how could you do so?" This pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who was to be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, and who was to befriend him and cheer him in a thousand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora, with whom Cowper, after the fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly in love. He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculable element into his writing which I do not like to contemplate; for it is the way of poets to describe most ideally what fortune has denied them in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to portray in prose and verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons very common in such cases, put an end to that danger. Cowper took the separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters of the period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories. They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection with his kinsfolk, Theodora, |