returns of tranquillity, haunted him to the end of life. Another disappointment, of which little has been said, and almost nothing is known, is understood to have fearfully aggravated his distress, and urged it to despair, at this mysterious crisis. He loved, and was beloved again; but whom he chose, and why they parted, cannot be told (it has been said) to the present generation. In all his published works, after this date, we find no hint concerning either his passion, or the object of it; as, on another bereaving occasion, when he had once seen Mrs. Unwin a corpse, he never afterwards named her; so, on this, he seems to have buried his grief in his bosom, and never allowed it to rise to his lips.

nor take

When he had recovered from this first attack, under the skilful care of Dr. Cotton, at St. Albans, he returned no more to his kindred and acquaintance. Having found, not only mental, but spiritual health, he withdrew to Huntingdon, to enjoy in solitude that peace of mind which the world can neither give away. Here he was found by the family of the Unwins, with whom he soon became an inmate, and from whom he was never afterwards separated, till death had taken them one by one away, and left him a wreck of humanity, sinking in still water, to the care of his own relatives. These, when he became known to all the world, recognized him, after long estrangement, caused less by their neglect than by his voluntary secession from them.

There were some remarkable, though perhaps not very unusual, contrarieties in the temperament, bodily and mental, of Cowper. A natural healthful

gaiety, perceptible in all his works, was combined in him with a constitutional disposition to gloom and melancholy, inaccessible to comfort, and invincible by reason; while one of the clearest, strongest, and most acute understandings with which man had ever been gifted, though in no other point vulnerable, was every moment in danger of being prostrated, through all its operations, by one besetting infirmity -an infirmity so exquisitely irrational, that it owned no coherence with any thing which he either knew by experience, or believed upon evidence. Satire was his peculiar forte; but it was the satire of pleasantry, rather than of scorn or indignation. His imagination was playful, and easily delighted with any thing innocently ludicrous; but when roused into "noble rage," he could exchange the shafts of Apollo for the bolts of Jove, and wield the lightnings as fearfully, as he sported skilfully with the "sun's arrows."

With regard to his malady, there scarcely needs any other proof that it was not occasioned by his religion than this, that the error on which he stumbled was in direct contradiction to his creed. He believed that he had been predestinated to life, yet, under this delusion, imagined, that God, who could not lie, repent, or change, had, in his sole instance, and in one moment, reversed his own decree which had been in force from all eternity. At the same time, by a perversion of the purest principle of Christian obedience, he was so submitted to the will of God, that, to have saved himself from the very destruction which he dreaded, he would not avail him

self of any of the means of grace, (even presuming they might have been efficacious,) because he believed that they were forbidden to him. Yet, in spite of the self-evident impossibility of his faith affecting a sound mind with such an hallucination ; though a mind previously diseased might as readily fall into that as any other ;-in spite of chronology, his first aberration of reason having taken place before he had "tasted the good word of God;"-in spite of geography, that calamity having befallen him in London, where he had no acquaintance with persons holding the reprobated doctrines of election and sovereign grace ;-and, in spite of the fact, utterly undeniable, that, till his spirit was revived by the success of his poetry, the only effectual consolations which he knew, after that first access of insanity, were the consolations of the gospel, at St. Albans, at Huntingdon, and at Olney;-in spite of all these unanswerable confutations of the ignorant and malignant falsehood, the enemies of Christian truth persevere in repeating, "that too much religion made poor Cowper mad." If they be sincere, they are themselves under the "strong delusion to believe a lie;" and it will be well if it prove not, on their part, a wilful one-it will be well if they have not reached that last perversity of human reason, to believe a lie of its own invention.

Which was the happiest period of Cowper's existence on earth? Unquestionably, when he came from St. Albans to Huntingdon, and during the earlier part of his acquaintance with the Unwins. There, when his soul had escaped, "like a bird

from the snare of the fowler,"-for "the snare was broken," he had escaped, and like the bird, that bursts into song as it takes wing, he experienced love, joy, freedom, and peace in believing. Happily we have his own record of his feelings at the commencement of this sabbatic era, in the two first hymns which he is known to have composed. These were the overflowings of his heart in solitude, while he walked with God, and was a stranger on the earth; having left his own connections, and not yet found new ones in the church-his amiable brother, the Rev. John Cowper, of Cambridge, and Dr. Cotton, of St. Albans, being then his only friends. These hymns are Nos. 44 and 45 in Book III. of the Olney Collection, especially the latter, beginning, "Far from the world, O Lord, I flee;" every syllable of which is the direct expression of present personal experience.

"The calm retreat, the silent shade,

With prayer and praise agree;
And seem by thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow Thee.

There, if thy Spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,

Oh, with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!

There like the nightingale she pours

Her solitary lays;

Nor asks a witness of her song,

Nor thirsts for human praise."

This is the language of first love-pure, tender, unreserved; delighting to meditate on itself and

its object. More touchingly beautiful even than these strains of voluntary, irrepressible happiness, are some in a hymn of later date, in which he laments the departure of those days of close converse with God:

"Where is the blessedness I knew,

When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus, and his word?

What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill."

Those who would trace the disease of Cowper's mind, as far as human search can penetrate, must go to a much earlier period of his life than this. There is a memoir of his own writing on the subject, which, some say, ought never to have seen the light; but, having once seen it, can never be withdrawn, while there is either taste, curiosity, or sympathy, in a "Briton born." This inestimable document exhibits one of the most minute and faithful disclosures of individual feeling ever given to mankind,—with such truth, simplicity, and pathos, that love, admiration, pity, alternately warm and melt the soul of the reader, in being thus introduced into the secret of the writer's heart. Seldom has there been a tale of so much sorrow told in so few lines, and with such a light of reality thrown on the darkest and most mysterious impulses and sensibilities of human nature, under its most humbling circumstances. No