Olney, with whom he voluntarily associated himself in the duty of visiting the cottages of the poor, and comforting their distresses. Mr. Newton and he were joint almoners in the secret donations of the wealthy and charitable Mr. Thornton, who transmitted 2007. a year for the poor of Olney. At Mr. Newton's request he wrote some hymns, which were published in a collection, long before he was known as a poet. His tremendous malady unhappily returned in 1773, attended with severe paroxysms of religious despondency, and his faculties were again eclipsed for about five years. During that period Mrs. Unwin watched over him with a patience and tenderness truly maternal. After his second recovery, some of his amusements, such as taming hares, and making bird-cages, would seem to indicate no great confidence in the capacity of his mind for mental employment. But he still continued to be a cursory reader; he betook himself also to drawing landscapes; and, what might have been still less expected at fifty years of age, began in earnest to cultivate his poetical talents. These had lain, if not dormant, at least so slightly employed, as to make his poetical progress, in the former part of his life, scarcely capable of being traced. He spent, however, the winter of 1780-1 in preparing his first volume of Poems for the press, consisting of "Table Talk," Hope," ," "The Progress of Error," "Charity," &c. and it was published in 1782. Its reception was not equal to its merit, though his modest expectations were not upon the whole disappointed; and he had the satisfaction of ranking Dr. Johnson and Benjamin Franklin among his zealous admirers. The volume was certainly good fruit under a rough rind, conveying manly thoughts, but in a tone of enthusiasm which is often harsh and forbidding. In the same year that he published his first volume, an elegant and accomplished visitant came to Olney, with whom Cowper formed an acquaintance that was for some time very delightful to him. This was the widow of Sir Robert Austen. She had wit, gaiety, agreeable manners, and elegant taste. While she enlivened Cowper's unequal spirits by her conversation, she was also the task-mistress of his Muse. He began his great original poem at her suggestion, and was exhorted by her to undertake the translation of Homer. So much cheerfulness seems to have beamed upon his sequestered life from the influence of her society, that he gave her the endearing appellation of Sister Anne, and ascribed the arrival of so pleasing a friend to the direct interposition of Heaven. But his devout old friend, At the age of eighteen, he wrote some tolerable verses on finding the heel of a shoe; a subject which is not uncharacteristic of his disposition to moralise on whimsical subjects. [These verses have an imitative resemblance to the style of "The Splendid Shilling." Philips was a great favourite with Cowper, as with Thomson. It is remarkable that "The Task" should open in Philips' style.] Mrs. Unwin, saw nothing very providential in the ascendancy of a female so much more fascinating than herself over Cowper's mind; and, appealing to his gratitude for her past services, she gave him his choice of either renouncing Lady Austen's acquaintance, or her own. Cowper decided upon adhering to the friend who had watched over him in his deepest afflictions, and sent Lady Austen a valedictory letter, couched in terms of regret and regard, but which neces sarily put an end to their acquaintance. Whether in making this decision he sacrificed a passion, or only a friendship for Lady Austen, it must be impossible to tell; but it has been said, though not by Mr. Hayley, that the remembrance of a deep and devoted attachment of his youth was never effaced by any succeeding impression of the same nature, and that his fondness for Lady Austen was as platonic as for Mary Unwin. The sacrifice, however, cost him much pain, and is, perhaps, as much to be admired as regretted †. Fortunately, the jealousy of Mrs. Unwin did not extend to his cousin, Lady Hesketh. His letters to that lady give the most pleasing view of Cowper's mind, exhibiting all the warmth of his heart as a kinsman, and his simple and unstudied elegance as a correspondent. His intercourse with this relation, after a separation of nearly thirty years, was revived by her writing to congratulate him on the appearance of his "Task," in 1784. Two years after, Lady Hesketh paid him a visit at Olney; and settling at Weston, in the immediate neighbourhood, provided a house for him and Mrs. Unwin there, which was more commodious than their former habitation. She also brought her carriage and horses with her, and thus induced him to survey the country in a wider range than he had been hitherto accustomed to take, as well as to mix a little more with its inhabitants. As soon as "The Task" had been sent to the press, he began the "Tirocinium," a poem on the subject of education, the purport of which was (in his own words) to censure the want of discipline and the inattention to morals which prevail in public schools, and to recommend private education as preferable on all accounts. In the same year, 1784, he commenced his translation of Homer, which was brought to a conclusion and published by subscription in 1791. The first edition of Homer was scarcely out of his hands, when he embraced a proposal from a bookseller to be the editor of Milton's poetry, and to furnish a version of his Italian and Latin poems, together with a critical commentary on his whole works. Capable as he was of guiding the reader's attention to the higher beauties of Milton, his habits and recluse situation made him peculiarly unfit for the more minute functions of an editor. In the progress of the work, he seems [+" Both Lady Austen and Mrs. Unwin," says Southey, "appear to me to have been wronged by the causes assigned for the difference between them."] to have been constantly drawn away, by the anxious correction of his great translation; insomuch, that his second edition of Homer was rather a new work than a revisal of the old. The subsequent history of his life may make us thankful that the powers of his mind were spared to accomplish so great an undertaking. Their decline was fast approaching. In 1792, Mr. Hayley paid him a visit at Olney, and was present to console him under his affliction, at seeing Mrs. Unwin attacked by the palsy. The shock subsided, and a journey, which he undertook in company with Mrs. Unwin, to Mr. Hayley's at Eartham, contributed, with the genial air of the south, and the beautiful scenery of the country, to revive his spirits; but they drooped, and became habitually dejected, on his return to Olney. In a moment of recovered cheerfulness, he projected a poem on the four ages of man-infancy, youth, manhood, and old age; but he only finished a short fragment of it. Mr. Hayley paid him a second visit in the November of 1793; he found him still possessed of all his exquisite feelings; but there was something undescribable in his appearance, which foreboded his relapsing into hopeless despondency. Lady Hesketh repaired once more to Olney, and with a noble friendship undertook the care of two invalids, who were now incapable of managing themselves, Mrs. Unwin being, at this time, entirely helpless and paralytic. Upon a third visit, Mr. Hayley found him plunged into a melancholy torpor, which extinguished even his social feelings. He met Mr. Hayley with apparent indifference; and when it was announced to him that his Majesty had bestowed on him a pension of 300l. a year, the intelligence arrived too late to give him pleasure. He continued under the care of Lady Hesketh until the end of July 1795, when he was removed, together with Mrs. Unwin, to the house of his kinsman, Mr. Johnson, at North Tuddenham, in Norfolk. Stopping on the journey at the village of Eaton, near St. Neots, Cowper walked with Mr. Johnson in the churchyard of that village by moonlight, and talked with more composure than he had shown for many months. The subject of their conversation was the poet Thomson. Some time after, he went to see his cousin, Mrs. Bodham, at a village near the residence of Mr. Johnson. When he saw, in Mrs. Bodham's parlour, a portrait of himself, which had been done by Abbot, he clasped his hands in a paroxysm of distress, wishing that he could now be what he was when that likeness was taken. In December 1796, Mrs. Unwin died, in a house to which Mr. Johnson had removed, at Dunham, in the same county. Cowper, who had seen her half an hour before she expired, attended Mr. Johnson to survey her remains in the dusk of the evening; but, after looking on her for a few moments, he started away, with a vehement unfinished exclamation of anguish; and, either forgetting her in the suspension of his faculties, or not daring to trust his lips with the subject, he never afterwards uttered her name. In 1799 he resumed some power of exertion; he finished the revision of his Homer, translated some of Gay's fables into Latin, and wrote his last original poem, "The Cast-away." But it seems, from the utterly desolate tone of that production, that the finishing blaze of his fancy and intellects had communicated no warmth of joy to his heart. The dropsy, which had become visible in his person, assumed an incurable aspect in the following year; and, after a rapid decline, he expired, on the 5th of April, 1800. The nature of Cowper's works makes us peculiarly identify the poet and the man in perusing them. As an individual, he was retired and weaned from the vanities of the world; and as an original writer, he left the ambitious and luxuriant subjects of fiction and passion, for those of real life and simple nature, and for the development of his own earnest feelings, in behalf of moral and religious truth. His language has such a masculine idiomatic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments having come from the author's heart, and of the enthusiasm, in whatever he describes, having been unfeigned and unexaggerated. He impresses us with the idea of a being whose fine spirit had been long enough in the mixed society of the world to be polished by its intercourse, and yet withdrawn so soon as to retain an unworldly degree of purity and simplicity. He was advanced in years before he became an author; but his compositions display a tenderness of feeling so youthfully preserved, and even a vein of humour so far from being extinguished by his ascetic habits, that we can scarcely regret his not having written them at an earlier period of life. For he blends the determination of age with an exquisite and ingenuous sensibili. ty; and though he sports very much with his subjects, yet when he is in earnest, there is a gravity of long-felt conviction in his sentiments, which gives an uncommon ripeness of character to his poetry. It is due to Cowper to fix our regard on this unaffectedness and authenticity of his works, considered as representations of himself, because he forms a striking instance of genius writing the history of its own secluded feelings, reflections, and enjoyments, in a shape so interesting as to engage the imagination like a work of fiction. He has invented no character in fable, nor in the drama; but he has left a record of his own character, which forms not only an object of deep [*Founded upon an incident related in Anson's Voyages. It is the last original piece he composed, and, all circumstances considered, one of the most affecting that ever was composed.-SOUTHEY.] sympathy, but a subject for the study of human nature. His verse, it is true, considered as such a record, abounds with opposite traits of severity and gentleness, of playfulness and superstition, of solemnity and mirth, which appear almost anomalous; and there is, undoubtedly, sometimes an air of moody versatility in the extreme contrasts of his feelings. But looking to his poetry as an entire structure, it has a massive air of sincerity. It is founded in stedfast principles of belief; and if we may prolong the architectural metaphor, though its arches may be sometimes gloomy, its tracery sportive, and its lights and shadows grotesquely crossed, yet altogether it still forms a vast, various, and interesting monument of the builder's mind. Young's works are as devout, as satirical, sometimes as merry, as those of Cowper, and undoubtedly more witty. But the melancholy and wit of Young do not make up to us the idea of a conceivable or natural being. He has sketched in his pages the ingenious but incongruous form of a fictitious mind-Cowper's soul speaks from his volumes. At the same time, while there is in Cowper a power of simple expression-of solid thought -and sincere feeling, which may be said, in a general view, to make the harsher and softer traits of his genius harmonise, I cannot but recur to the observation, that there are occasions when his contrarieties and asperities are positively unpleasing. Mr. Hayley commends him for possessing, above any ancient or modern author, the nice art of passing, by the most delicate transition, from subjects to subjects, which might otherwise seem to be but little, or not at all, allied to each other: "From grave to gay, from lively to severe." With regard to Cowper's art of transition, I am disposed to agree with Mr. Hayley, that it was very nice. In his own mind, trivial and solemn subjects were easily associated, and he appears to make no effort in bringing them together. The transition sprang from the peculiar habits of his imagination, and was marked by the delicacy and subtlety of his powers. But the general taste and frame of the human mind is not calculated to receive pleasure from such transitions, however dexterously they may be made. The reader's imagination is never so passively in the hands of an author, as not to compare the different impressions arising from successive passages; and there is no versatility in the writer's own thoughts, Vide his story of Misagathus, [" The Task," B. vi..] which is meant to record the miraculous punishment of a sinner by his own horse. Misagathus, a wicked fellow, as his name denotes, is riding abroad, and overtakes a sober-minded traveller on the road, whose ears he assails with the most improper language; till his horse, out of all patience at his owner's impiety, approaches the brink of a precipice, and fairly tosses his reprobate rider into the sea. that will give an air of natural connexion to subjects, if it does not belong to them. Whatever Cowper's art of transition may be, the effect of it is to crowd into close contiguity his Dutch painting and Divinity. This moment we view him, as if prompted by a disdain of all the gaudy subjects of imagination, sporting agreeably with every trifle that comes in his way; in the next, a recollection of the most awful concerns of the human soul, and a belief that four-fifths of the species are living under the ban of their Creator's displeasure, come across his mind; and we then, in the compass of a page, exchange the facetious satirist, or the poet of the garden or the greenhouse, for one who speaks to us in the name of the Omnipotent, and who announces to us all his terrors. No one, undoubtedly, shall prescribe limits to the association of devout and ordinary thoughts; but still propriety dictates, that the aspect of composition shall not rapidly turn from the smile of levity to a frown that denounces eternal perdition. He not only passes, within a short compass, from the jocose to the awful, but he sometimes blends them intimately together. It is fair that blundering commentators on the Bible should be exposed. The idea of a drunken postilion forgetting to put the linchpin in the wheel of his carriage, may also be very entertaining to those whose safety is not endangered by his negligence; but still the comparison of a false judgment which a perverse commentator may pass on the Holy Scriptures, with the accident of Tom the driver being in his cups, is somewhat too familiar for so grave a subject. The force, the humour, and picturesqueness of those satirical sketches, which are interspersed with his religious poems on Hope, Truth, Charity, &c. in his first volume, need not be disputed. One should be sorry to lose them, or indeed anything that Cowper has written, always saving and excepting the story of Misagathus and his horse, which might be mistaken for an interpolation by Mrs. Unwin. But in those satirical sketches there is still a taste of something like comic sermons; whether he describes the antiquated prude going to church, followed by her footboy, with the dew-drop hanging at his nose, or Vinoso, in the military messroom, thus expounding his religious belief: "Adieu to all morality! if Grace Make works a vain ingredient in the case. I glide and steal along with Heaven in view, And,-pardon me, the bottle stands with you."-Hope. The mirth of the above lines consists chiefly in placing the doctrine of the importance of good works to salvation in the mouth of a drunkard. It is a Calvinistic poet making game of an antiCalvinistic creed, and is an excellent specimen of pious bantering and evangelical raillery. But Religion, which disdains the hostility of ridicule, ought also to be above its alliance. Against this practice of compounding mirth and godliness, we may quote the poet's own remark upon St. Paul: "So did not Paul. Direct me to a quip, Or merry turn, in all he ever wrote; And I consent you take it for your text." And the Christian poet, by the solemnity of his subject, certainly identifies himself with the Christian preacher; who, as Cowper elsewhere remarks, should be sparing of his smile. The noble effect of one of his religious pieces, in which he has scarcely in any instance descended to the ludicrous, proves the justice of his own advice. His "Expostulation" is a poetical sermon-an eloquent and sublime one. But there is no Hogarth-painting in this brilliant Scripture piece. Lastly, the objects of his satire are sometimes so unskilfully selected, as to attract either a scanty portion of our indignation, or none at all. When he exposes real vice and enormity, it is with a power that makes the heart triumph in their exposure. But we are very little interested by his declamations on such topics as the effeminacy of modern soldiers; the prodigality of poor gentlemen giving cast clothes to their valets; or the finery of a country girl, whose head-dress is "indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand." There is also much of the querulous laudator temporis acti in reproaching the English youths of his own day, who beat the French in trials of horsemanship, for not being like their forefathers, who beat the same people in contests for crowns; as if there were anything more laudable in men butchering their fellow-creatures, for the purposes of unprincipled ambition, than employing themselves in the rivalship of manly exercise. One would have thought too, that the gentle recluse of Olney, who had so often employed himself in making boxes and bird-cages, might have had a little more indulgence for such as amuse themselves with chess and billiards, than to inveigh so bitterly against those pastimes. In the mean time, while the tone of his satire becomes rigid, that of his poetry is apt to grow relaxed. The saintly and austere artist seems to be so much afraid of making song a mere fascination to the ear, that he casts, now and then, a little roughness into his versification, particularly his rhymes; not from a vicious ear, but merely to show that he despises being smooth; forgetting that our language has no superfluous harmony to throw away, and that the roughness of verse is not its strength, but its weakness-the stagnation of the stream, and not its forcible current. Apparently, also, from the fear of osten[* See "The Task," B. vi. 1. 265 to 1. 277.] tation in language, he occasionally sinks his expression into flatness. Even in his high-toned poem of "Expostulation," he tells Britain of the time when she was a "puling starveling ehit+." Considering the tenor and circumstances of his life, it is not much to be wondered at, that some asperities and peculiarities should have adhered to the strong stem of his genius, like the moss and fungus that cling to some noble oak of the forest, amidst the damps of its unsunned retirement. It is more surprising that he preserved, in such seclusion, so much genuine power of comic observation. Though he himself acknowledged having written " many things with bile" in his first volume ‡, yet his satire has many legitimate objects: and it is not abstracted and declamatory satire ; but it places human manners before us in the liveliest attitudes and clearest colours. There is much of the full distinctness of Theophrastus, and of the nervous and concise | spirit of La Bruyère, in his piece entitled "Conversation," with a cast of humour superadded, which is peculiarly English, and not to be found out of England. Nowhere have the sophist-the dubious man, whose evidence, "For want of prominence and just relief, Would hang an honest man, and save a thief— the solemn fop, an oracle behind an empty cask -the sedentary weaver of long tales-the emphatic speaker, "who dearly loves t'oppose, In contact inconvenient, nose to nose Conversation. nowhere have these characters, and all the most prominent nuisances of colloquial intercourse, together with the bashful man, who is a nuisance to himself, been more happily delineated. One species of purity his satires possess, which is, that they are never personal §. To his high-minded views, "An individual was a sacred mark, Not to be struck in sport, or in the dark." Every one knows from how accidental a circumstance his greatest original work, The [t "While yet thou wast a groveling puling chit, Thy bones not fashion'd, and thy joints not knit." Expostulation.] [Southey's Cowper, vol. i. p. 261, and vol. ii. p. 183] § A single exception may be made to this remark, in the instance of Occiduus, whose musical Sunday parties he reprehended, and who was known to mean the Rev. G. Wesley. [See "The Progress of Error." "Beneath well-sounding Greek I slur a name a poet must not speak."-Hope] I know not to whom he alludes in these lines, Built God a church, and laugh'd His word to scorn." ["The Calvinist meant Voltaire, and the church of Ferney, with its inscription, Deo erexit Voltaire.”—BYRON, Works vol. xvi. p. 124. See also Southey's Cowper, vel. viii. p. 305.] Task," took its rise, namely, from his having one day complained to Lady Austen that he knew not what subject of poetry to choose, and her having told him to take her sofa for his theme. The mock-heroic commencement of "The Task" has been censured as a blemish. The general taste, I believe, does not find it so. Mr. Hayley's commendation of his art of transition may, in this instance, be fairly admitted, for he quits his ludicrous history of the sofa, and glides into a description of other objects, by an easy and natural association of thoughts. His whimsical outset in a work where he promises so little and performs so much, may even be advantageously contrasted with those magnificent commencements of poems which pledge both the reader and the writer, in good earnest, to a task. Cowper's poem, on the contrary, is like a river, which rises from a playful little fountain, and which gathers beauty and magnitude as it proceeds. "velut tenui nascens de fomite rivus Per tacitas, primum nullo cum murmure, valles He leads us abroad into his daily walks; he exhibits the landscapes which he was accustomed to contemplate, and the trains of thought in which he habitually indulged. No attempt is made to interest us in legendary fictions, or historical recollections connected with the ground over which he expatiates; all is plainness and reality; but we instantly recognise the true poet, in the clearness, sweetness, and fidelity of his scenic draughts; in his power of giving novelty to what is common; and in the high relish, the exquisite enjoyment of rural sights and sounds which he communicates to the spirit. "His eyes drink the rivers with delight +." He excites an idea, that almost amounts to sensation, of the freshness and delight of a rural walk, even when he leads us to the wasteful common, which, "overgrown with fern, and rough The Task, B. i. His rural prospects have far less variety and compass than those of Thomson; but his graphic touches are more close and minute: not that Thomson was either deficient or undelightful in circumstantial traits of the beauty of nature, but * In the Edinburgh Review. [The fox-hunting scene in Thomson's Autumn was cut away by Lord Lyttelton from every edition of "The Seasons" between 1750 and 1762, when Murdoch restored the scene to its proper position. Lyttelton thought that an imitation of Philips was not in keeping with the tone of the poem.] An expression in one of his letters. he looked to her as a whole more than Cowper. His genius was more excursive and philosophical. The poet of Olney, on the contrary, regarded human philosophy with something of theological contempt. To his eye, the great and little things of this world were levelled into an equality, by his recollection of the power and purposes of Him who made them. They are, in his view, only as toys spread on the lap and carpet of nature, for the childhood of our immortal being. This religious indifference to the world, is far, indeed, from blunting his sensibility to the genuine and simple beauties of creation; but it gives his taste a contentment and fellowship with humble things. It makes him careless of selecting and refining his views of nature, beyond their casual appearHe contemplated the face of plain rural English life, in moments of leisure and sensibility, till its minutest features were impressed upon his fancy; and he sought not to embellish what he loved. Hence his landscapes have less of the ideally beautiful than Thomson's ; but they have an unrivalled charm of truth and reality. ance. The flat country where he resided certainly exhibited none of those wilder graces of nature which he had sufficient genius to have delineated; and yet there are perhaps few romantic descriptions of rocks, precipices, and torrents, which we should prefer to the calm English character and familiar repose of the following landscape. It is in the finest manner of Cowper, and unites all his accustomed fidelity and distinctness with a softness and delicacy which are not always to be found in his specimens of the picturesque. "How oft upon yon eminence our pace "Yon tall anchoring bark Diminish'd to her cock, her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight."-King Lear. The original of Cowper's line, "God made the country and man made the town," The Task. is not in Hawkins Browne, as Cowper's friend Rose imagined, but in Cowley: "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain "Essays. The Garden. a more vigorous though a quainter line. This is not among the parallel passages produced by Mr. Peace, and printed in Mr. Southey's edition of Cowper. (See vol. vi. p. 227, and vol. ix. p. 92.) Is this a resemblance or a theft? Cowley's thought could take no other shape in Cowper's mind.] |