TO THE REV. WILLIAM BULL. MY DEAR FRIEND, June 20, 1783. THIS comes accompanied by a letter Mrs. Unwin received from Mrs. Powley; she thought it would please you. I send you the petite piece I promised, not quite so worthy of your notice; but it is yours by engagement, otherwise, I believe you would never have seen it1. The ladies are in the greenhouse, and tea waits. WM. COWPER. TO THE REV. WILLIAM BULL. MY DEAR FRIEND, June 27, 1783. A FINE morning, though a shady one, has induced me to spend that time in walking which I had devoted to the quill; consequently I send you no letter for Mr. Newton, but am obliged to postpone my answer to his last till the usual opportunity shall arrive. I cannot resist fine weather; and the omission is of no great consequence, both because I have nothing new to communicate, and because I have a frank which will convey that nothing to him gratis. I wish you and yours a pleasant excursion, as pleasant as the season and the scene to which you are going can possibly make it. I shall rejoice to hear from you, and am sufficiently flattered by the recollection, that just after hearing you protest against all letter-writing, I 1 "The rose had been wash'd (just wash'd in a show'r)." heard you almost promise to write a letter to me. The journeys of a man like you must all be sentimental journeys, and better worth the recital than Sterne's would have been, had he travelled to this moment. THE translation of your letters into Dutch was news that pleased me much. I intended plain prose, but a rhyme obtruded itself, and I became poetical when I least expected it. The Bœotian atmosphere I have breathed these six days past, makes such a sally of genius the more surprising, so long, in a country not subject to fogs, we have been covered with one of the thickest I remember. We never see the sun but shorn of his beams. The trees are scarce discernible at a mile's distance. He sets with the face of a redhot salamander, and rises, (as I learn from report,) with the same complexion. Such a phenomenon at the end of June has occasioned much speculation among the connoscenti at this place. Some fear to go to bed, expecting an earthquake; some declare that he neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of Judgement is at hand. This is probable, and I believe it myself, but for other reasons. In the meantime I cannot discover in them, however alarmed, the symptoms even of a temporary reformation. This very Sunday morning the pitchers of all have been carried into Silver End as usual, the inhabitants perhaps judging that they have more than ordinary need of that cordial at such a juncture. It is however, seriously, a remarkable appearance, and the only one of the kind that at this season of the year has fallen under my notice. Signs in the heavens are predicted characters of the last times; and in the course of the last fifteen years I have been a witness of many. The present obfuscation, (if I may call it so,) of all nature may be ranked perhaps among the most remarkable; but possibly it may not be universal; in London at least, where a dingy atmosphere is frequent, it may be less observable. Pardon a digression which I slipped into at unawares, a transition from Holland to a fog was not unnatural. When you wrote those letters you did not dream that you were designed for an apostle to the Dutch. Yet so it proves, and such among many others are the advantages we derive from the art of printing: an art in which indisputably man was instructed by the same great teacher who taught him to embroider for the service of the sanctuary, and to beat out the cummin, and which amounts almost to as great a blessing as the gift of tongues, diffusing an author's sentiments upon the noblest subjects through a people. Mrs. Unwin desires me to send her love, and to thank Mrs. Newton for all she has done for her. Every thing has arrived safe, and been managed exactly to her mind. In the course of next month she hopes to treat you with a cupple of dux. Yours, my dear friend, W. C. TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON. MY DEAR FRIEND, July 27, 1783. You cannot have more pleasure in receiving a letter from me, than I should find in writing it, were it not almost impossible in such a place to find a subject. I live in a world abounding with incidents, upon which many grave, and perhaps some profitable observations might be made; but those incidents never reaching my unfortunate ears, both the entertaining narrative and the reflection it might suggest are to me annihilated and lost. I look back to the past week, and say, what did it produce? I ask the same question of the week preceding, and duly receive the same answer from both,-nothing!-A situation like this, in which I am as unknown to the world, as I am ignorant of all that passes in it, in which I have nothing to do but to think, would exactly suit me, were my subjects of meditation as agreeable as my leisure is uninterrupted. My passion for retirement is not at all abated, after so many years spent in the most sequestered state, but rather increased; a circumstance I should esteem wonderful to a degree not to be accounted for, considering the condition of my mind, did I not know, that we think as we are made s. C.-4. U to think, and of course approve and prefer, as Providence, who appoints the bounds of our habitation, chooses for us. Thus am I both free and a prisoner at the same time. The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there are no moats about my castle, no locks upon my gates, of which I have not the key; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a local attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt, even to the place of my birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for bounds which I cannot pass. In former years I have known sorrow, and before I had ever tasted of spiritual trouble. The effect was an abhorrence of the scene in which I had suffered so much, and a weariness of those objects which I had so long looked at with an eye of despondency and dejection. But it is otherwise with me now. cause subsisting, and in a much more powerful degree, fails to produce its natural effect. The very stones in the garden-walls are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest object, and be disagreeably affected by its removal, and am persuaded that were it possible I could leave this incommodious nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture, and be transported with the sight of objects which to all the world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps, such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls of the neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so, because here is to be my abode, and because such is the appointment of Him that placed me in it.-- Iste terrarum mihi præter omnes The same |