reposed under a more elegant or hospitable roof. Cowper's admiration of the house and its gardens is expressed in his letters. In the second summer after his visit, Mr. Cary, the translator of Dante, saw Hayley at Eartham. He talked of Cowper, and showed his favourite walk covered with laburnums, and the portrait by Romney. Twentyfive years wentby, and again the same ingenious scholar met the friend of Cowper; he was then an old man, living a lonely life in the village of Felpham; but the same beloved picture still hung before his eyes, and pointing to it, he said: “There is our idol.” Cowper returned to Weston, September 22, 1792; his companion somewhat improved in strength, but he boasting small, if any amendment. One blessing greeted him on the threshold, in the shape of a "manifestation of God's presence," only dimly seen, but an assurance that his Father's face had not entirely withdrawn its light. A month, however, did not elapse before he complained of the future being dark as ever, and spoke of himself as scrambling always among rocks and precipices, with the enemy at his heels eager to push him over headlong. The gloom rapidly thickened, until every greater and lesser light of hope and peace was obscured or extinguished in it. A pension of three hundred pounds from the King, in 1794, awoke no satisfaction in the poet's breast, and the solicitude of his affectionate cousin, Lady Hesketh, seemed to be altogether without fruit. It was now that his dear Johnny of Norfolk became his protector; and believing, that a summer's residence by the sea might invigorate his mind and body, on Tuesday, July 28, 1795, he prevailed on Cowper and Mrs. Unwin to accompany him to North Tuddenham, in Norfolk, which residence they subsequently exchanged for the village of Mundsley, on the coast. Cowper walked upon the sands, and listened to the soothing murmur of the breakers, but his heart was with the trees and the green leaves of Weston. The common herbs reminded him of the birds which he had left behind. For him the spring bloom and the autumn lights were to shine and set no longer : Unwatched the garden-bough shall sway, Dunham Lodge, near Swaffham, was also, for a season, the home of Cowper, where he listened to his kinsman reading the novels of Richardson, and other works of fiction; but the last scene of his troubled pilgrimage was the town of East Dereham, in the same county. There, December 17, 1796, his "Mary" fell asleep, and was buried in the north aisle of the church. His own body of death was to be dragged through four years longer; in that interval between night and morning, he bestowed considerable care upon his Homer, composed the pathetic poem, "The Cast-away," and translated some of the Latin verses of Vincent Bourne. But the end was in view; his constitution sank rapidly under the weight of anguish and time, and on Friday, the 25th of April, 1800, the voice of ONE who had been with him in all his storms, though he saw Him not, rebuked the waves and the winds, and there was a great calm. In the afternoon of that day the pilgrim spirit, its tears for ever dried, was at the haven where it would be. He was buried in St. Edmund's Chapel, in the church of East Dereham, on Saturday, the 2nd of May, and Hayley wrote the inscription for his monument. In Memory of WILLIAM COW PER, Esq. Born in Hertfordshire 1731. Buried in this Church 1800. Ye who with warmth the public triumph feel Here, to devotion's bard devoutly just, The literary claims of Cowper do not rest on his poetry alone; his prose is exquisite. "A line written from this place," was his remark to Mr. Unwin, in 1783, "is a crea tion." Barren soil he found in that Silver End of Olney. But his letters grew, like his poems, out of richer ground. The smallest seed became a flower. A rose, blown over by last night's gale, was to be bound up; Catharina's birthday had returned, and demanded a song; a friend dropped in, and he must take him to see Yardley Oak; he has just unpacked a wealthy hamper from his cousin ; a game of battledore and shuttlecock was to be finished with Lady Austen; or the last new book is to be read aloud to the evening circle. These were the materials of which he constructed his letters; and the style changes with the theme. Now we have a series of what, in the want of an English term, we may call genre-paintings, displaying home-life under its aspects of refinement and ease; then a moral and philosophical reflection, after the manner of Addison, with a mild gleam of Steele's pleasantry playing over it; afterwards, a wise and thoughtful homily, or a strain of warm and beautiful affection. The sunshine and the shadows, under the trees of Weston, might be the emblems of the gentleness and the humour that lighten and soften his many-coloured correspondence. He loved "talking letters," and wrote them; and if the talk be commonly of himself, who does not rejoice in the gain? "You tell me," Southey said to an old friend, “to write like an Egotist, and I am well-disposed to do so; for what else is it that gives private letters their greatest value, but the information they bring us of those for whom we are interested ?" The letters of Cowper are his "Prosewritings," and related to his poetry, and illustrating it; having the same features and expression, and speaking with equal elegance and beauty. Perhaps, with the single exception of Shakspere, Cowper is the English poet who has given the greatest happiness to the greatest number. He had said, in a moment of gratified feeling at hearing the commendation of Joseph Warton, that the poet who pleases a man like him, has nothing left to wish for. But the praise of Warton was only the suffrage of the Scholar. It has been the rare fortune of Cowper to obtain the votes of the crowd. What safer candidate for Parnassus might go to the poll? The tasteful read him for his grace, and the serious for his religion. And the pleasure which he affords is of that natural, healthy character, which leaves no heat and weariness behind it. The mind is strengthened without a stimulant. His poetry influences the feelings, as a summer day affects the body; and the reader has a sense of enjoyment, calm, pure, and lasting. As a moral satirist, Cowper may not be compared, for breadth and warmth of design and colour, with his elder brethren, Dryden and Pope; nor for power and music with his contemporary Churchill; and sometimes we seem to doze over a page of Mr. Newton's discourses set up in rhyme. But even in these ruder verses the chariotwheels began to kindle. He had only started in the race. The "Task" was the goal. Of the four Poems which are everywhere known and read, " Paradise Lost" wins higher reverence; the "Seasons" stir the pulse with a wilder rapture; and the "Night Thoughts" unveil grander visions of the soul and its glories; but the Task" is felt to be the chosen, the dear, the familiar friend; with a warning and a lesson for the old and the young, and a picture and a song for every hour in the day. No phrase can be more expressive than Coleridge's "divine chit-chat" of Cowper. Its biographical charm will be understood better by contrasting it with the " Prelude” of Wordsworth; and perhaps the only Episode which the reader wishes to erase, is that of the raising of cucumbers. Cowper has been called the Gainsborough of our poetry; and the pencil never sprinkled fresher dews over the leaf, 66 than we see dropping from his pen. The little nook of his rural life was beneficial to the truthfulness of his pictures. Those painters produce the noblest works who gaze much and often upon the same spots. Such was Claude, watching the morning and evening lights over the Vatican and the valley of the Tiber; G. Poussin gathering into his memory the broad shadows and the mouldering walls of the Coliseum; or Wilson returning to the old Scotch firs beside his door. The most delicious landscapes of Milton were composed in his sequestered home in a Buckinghamshire village, the continual haunt of his footsteps, and the harvest of his eye. The honours of Cowper are not to be restricted to his longer poems. There is scarcely any form of verse which he did not attempt, and he failed in none. The ballad of "John Gilpin" forms a class to itself; "Boadicea" is not far behind the ode of Campbell; while in poems of affection, the lyrics of his own heart, he challenges every brother of the lyre, from its first melody until now. The lines to "Mary," and to his "Mother's Picture," are not so much pathetic, as the words of Pathos itself. His lighter efforts of compliment and sympathy abound in sprightliness and play; the gallantry of the high-bred gentleman clothed in the allegory of the poet. Most of these pieces have a feminine birth and application. His manners in the society of women are said to have been extremely soft and engaging. He sang his choicest Larmonies at their bidding, or in their praise; and never more may they hope to crown with their white hands such an Ariosto of the fireside. And as he is among the most various, he is also one of the most original of our writers. Throughout the period of his author-life, his reading was slight. Of Collins he had never heard, until he saw his name in Johnson's Lives." Darwin surprised, and Beattie enchanted him; but his literary recollections belonged to early manhood, 66 |