Missionary Society was founded, how he set out for India, and what he accomplished there, must refer to other works. It becomes us here merely to observe that it was a curious coincidence that at the very moment the poet of Olney was bewailing the deplorable state of India, the missionary of Olney was studying map and lexicon with a view to carrying thither great blessings.

III. "The Nutshell of a Summer-house."June, 1785.

Cowper's letters are now besprinkled with references to the renowned summer-house, which, as will be remembered, I have been obliged to shear of its chief glory-the reputation of having been the place in which the poet wrote the "Task" and "John Gilpin." To Hill (June 25, 1785) he says: "I write in a nook that I call my boudoir. It is a summer-house not much bigger than a sedan-chair, the door of which opens into the garden, that is now crowded with pinks, roses, and honeysuckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard. It formerly served an apothecary (Mr. Aspray), now dead, as a smoking-room; and under my feet is a trap-door which once covered a hole in the ground, where he kept his bottles; at present, however, it is dedicated to sublimer uses. Having lined it with garden-mats, and furnished it with a table and two chairs, here I write all that I write in summer-time, whether to my friends or to the public. It is secure from all noise, and a refuge from all intrusion; for

intruders sometimes trouble me in the winter evenings at Olney; but (thanks to my boudoir !) I can now hide myself from them. A poet's retreat is sacred; they acknowledge the truth of that proposition, and never presume to violate it."

This little retreat is a plain rustic building of lath and plaster, covered with red tiles. It has one window which looks into the orchard between Cowper's house and the vicarage Guinea Field-and a door which from its much patched, yet withal very shaky, appearance, leads one to the belief that it must contain some of Cowper's own carpentering. The walls and ceiling are covered with the signatures of visitors, many of them being the names of persons of note from great distances. The two benches are a modern institution. Cowper, as we see from the extract just given, used a chair. In the floor is the trap-door Cowper refers to, or rather a board that takes up. Mr. Bull, who visited Cowper once a fortnight, used to keep his pipes and tobacco under it.

Though in all probability nothing of either the "Task" or "John Gilpin " was written in the summerhouse, this small retreat has claims on our reverence, for in it Cowper not only wrote numbers of his minor pieces, but made a commencement of his translation of Homer. By June, 1786, he had got to denominate it his "workshop" and his "verse manufactory." He tells Newton (June 22, 1786): "As soon as breakfast is over I retire to my nutshell of a summer-house, which is my verse manufactory, and here I abide seldom less than three hours, and not often more. In the afternoon I return to it again; and all the daylight that follows,

except what is devoted to a walk, is given to Homer." Elsewhere he calls it a bandbox.

He tells Unwin on June 12, 1785: "I am sitting in the summer-house (not the greenhouse); the door, which is open, is toward the garden, and the window, which is open also, is toward a pleasant orchard, so that if it were possible to be cool, that happiness would be mine, but in such a day as this there is no room to hope for it."

To Lady Hesketh (May 29, 1786) he says: "I long to show you my workshop, and to see you sitting on the opposite side of my table. We shall be as close packed as the wax figures in an old-fashioned pictureframe. I am writing in it now. It is the place in which I fabricate all my verse in summer-time."

From Cowper's house to the summer-house extended, as already observed, the " gravel walk of thirty yards." About half-way down this walk stood until recently some cottages, the bottoms of whose lower windows were on a level with the garden ground, and it is said that the poet as he paced his walk could sometimes hear one of the cottagers, "an old breechesmaker," singing, as he worked, to the plaintive tune of Ludlow, the hymn beginning

"O for a closer walk with God."

The tree of Ribstone pippins planted by Cowper, which stood near the cottages, has now disappeared. Of his garden he says: "The very stones in the wall are my intimate acquaintance-I should miss almost the minutest object."

Though the greenhouse had now a formidable rival

in the summer-house, the former was by no means discarded, as the letter to Lady Hesketh, of February 9, 1786, shows: "My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May or beginning of June; because, before that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with mats, and spread the floor with mats; and there you shall sit with a bed of mignonette at your side, and a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day."

112. The Three Days' Oasis.—In May, 1785.

Twelve years had now elapsed since the Fatal Dream-since Cowper had received, as he believed, his final doom. For twelve years this fantastic idea had possessed him. But now, in May, 1785, for a very brief period, the cloud was removed. The prayers of Mrs. Unwin, Newton, and his other friends seemed to be answered, and the prisoner of all these years felt his shackles fall from him. After all, God had not given him over, was his thought. "I began to hope," says he," that having walked the whole breadth of the bottom of this Red Sea, I was beginning to climb the opposite shore, and I prepared to sing the song of Moses." But to use his own words again, he was "doomed to disappointment," and he got it into his head, moreover, that God gave those hopes to him in derision, and took them away in vengeance. He thus alludes to this very small oasis in the great desert of

his spiritual experience (the letter was written twelve months later, on May 20, 1786).

"Adam's approach to the tree of life, after he had sinned, was not more effectually prohibited by the flaming sword that turned every way, than mine to its great Antitype has been now almost these thirteen years, a short interval of three or four days, which passed about this time twelvemonth, alone excepted. For what reason it is that I am thus long excluded, if I am ever again to be admitted, is known to God only. I can say but this: that if He is still my Father, chis paternal severity has toward me been such as that I have reason to account it unexampled. For though others have suffered desertion, yet few, I believe, for so long a time, and perhaps none a desertion accompanied with such experiences. But they have this belonging to them, that, as they are not fit for recital, being made up merely of infernal ingredients, so neither are they susceptible of it; for I know no language in which they could be expressed. They are as truly things which it is not possible for man to utter as those were which Paul heard and saw in the third heaven. If the ladder of Christian experience reaches, as I suppose it does, to the very presence of God, it has nevertheless its foot in the abyss. And if Paul stood, as no doubt he did, in that experience of his to which I have just alluded, on the topmost round of it, I have been standing, and still stand, on the lowest, in this thirteenth year that has passed since I descended."

The following letter to Newton, dated May, 1785, seems to have been written shortly after that "short interval of three or four days":