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more unhappy than the traveller with whom I set out, pass through what difficulties I may, through whatever dangers and afflictions, I am not a whit the nearer home, unless a dungeon may be called so. This is no very agreeable theme; but in so great a dearth of subjects to write upon, and especially impressed as I am at this moment with a sense of my own condition, I could choose no other. The weather is an exact emblem of my mind in its present state. A thick fog envelopes every thing, and at the same time it freezes intensely. You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it ;-but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more. hedge that has been apparently dead, is not so; it will burst into leaf and blossom at the appointed time; but no such time is appointed for the stake that stands in it. It is as dead as it seems, and will prove itself no dissembler. The latter end of next month will complete a period of eleven years in which I have spoke no other language. It is a long time for a man, whose eyes were once opened, to spend in darkness; long enough to make despair an inveterate habit; and such it is in me. My friends, I know, expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of divine truth, that he who once had possession of it should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every case but my own. And why not in my own? For causes which to them it appears madness to allege, but which rest upon my mind with a weight of immoveable conviction. If I am recoverable, why am I thus? why crippled and made useless in the church, just at that time of life, when, my judgement and experience being matured, I might be most useful? why cashiered and turned out of service, till, according to the course of nature, there is not life enough left in me to make amends for the years I have lost; till there is no reasonable hope left that the fruit can ever pay the expense of the fallow? I forestall the answer:-God's ways are mysterious, and he giveth no account of his matters-an answer that would serve my purpose as well as theirs that use it. There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained. Yours, W.C.

Mr. Newton, for the purpose of discouraging this strain,

said to him, that as he conversed upon other subjects than despair, he might write upon others. "Indeed, my friend," Cowper replied, "I am a man of very little conversation upon any subject. From that of despair I abstain as much as possible, for the sake of my company; but I will venture to say that it is never out of my mind one minute in the whole day. I do not mean to say that I am never cheerful. I am often so always indeed when my nights have been undisturbed for a season. But the effect of such continual listening to the language of a heart hopeless and deserted, is, that I can never give much more than half my attention to what is started by others, and very rarely start any thing myself. My silence, however, and my absence of mind make me sometimes as entertaining as if I had wit. They furnish an occasion for friendly and good natured raillery; they raise a laugh, and I partake of it."

It is consolatory to believe that during this long stage of his malady, Cowper was rarely so miserable as he represented himself to be when speaking of his own case. That no one ought to be pronounced happy before the last scene is over, has been said of old in prose and in verse, and the common feeling of mankind accords with the saying; for our retrospect of any individual's history is coloured by the fortune of his latter days, as a drama takes its character from the catastrophe. A melancholy sentiment will always for this reason prevail when Cowper is thought of. But though his disease of mind settled at last into the deepest shade, and ended in the very blackness of darkness, it is not less certain that before it reached that point, it allowed him many years of moral and intellectual enjoyment. They who have had most opportunity of observing and studying madness in all its mysterious forms, and in all its stages, know that the same degree of mental suffering is not produced by imaginary causes of distress as by real ones. Violent emotions, and outbreaks of ungovernable anger are at times easily excited, but not anguish of mind, not that abiding grief which eats into the heart. The distress, even when the patient retains, like Cowper, the full use of reason upon all other points, is in this respect like that of a dream,—a dream, indeed, from which the sufferer can neither wake, nor be awa

62 March 19, 1784.

kened; but it pierces no deeper, and there seems to be the same dim consciousness of its unreality 63.

After the recurrence of his disease in 1773, his friends appear to have acted judiciously towards him. So long as Mr. Newton resided at Olney, Mrs. Unwin would act implicitly under his advice, and after his departure her own good sense led her to pursue the same quiet, expectant course. Whether

they had perceived or not that Cowper's constitution could not bear devotional excitement was of little consequence while he fancied himself inhibited from all exercises of devotion; and to have reasoned with him upon the single point on which his reason was deranged, would have been to act unreasonably themselves. Argument to a mind thus diseased is of no more avail than food to a sick stomach incapable of retaining it. When Mr. Newton touched on the subject in his letters, it was like feeling his pulse from time to time, and always in a way to encourage an expectation of recovery. Mrs. Unwin, meantime, contented herself with a patient hope, and it is evident that Cowper had some comfort in knowing this hope was confidently and constantly maintained. This comfort he had during those years, when at the worst; and it gained strength as his manner of life became more social.

No man had been more accustomed than he was to that kind of society which brings the intellectual powers into full play. So many youths of distinguished talent were never at any other time contemporaries at Westminster, as in Cowper's days; and when he was removed from that daily and hourly intercourse with his peers to a solicitor's office, it was his fortune there to find in a fellow clerk, one who was not inferior to the ablest of them. Thurlow, whom Sir Egerton Brydges calls "the surly, sarcastic, contradictory, old ruler of the courts," had not then contracted any of the callousness of professional and political life. He was in those days. as much disposed to sportiveness as Cowper himself, and brought to it those ready talents, and that force of mind which afterwards

63 These remarks are not merely speculative. They are the result of observation, in the case of an old friend, whose intellectual powers were of a very high order, and the type of whose malady at that time very much resembled Cowper's. He resembled him also in this respect, that when in company with persons who were not informed of his condition, no one could descry in him the slightest appearance of a deranged mind.

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commanded the respect of Dr. Johnson. "It is when you come close to a man in conversation," said that great conversationist, "that you discover what his real abilities are; to make a speech in a public assembly is a knack. I honour Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow; he fairly puts his mind to yours." And on another occasion he said, "I would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow. When I am to meet with him, I should wish to know a day before." And when Cowper left the office, and became master of his own time, no where could he have found more lively companions than the members of his own club and their associates. It was after having been "enlivened by the witty sallies of Thornton, Wilkes, Churchill, and Lloyd," that Boswell, who had passed the morning with them, "boldly,"—in his own words, "repaired to Dr. Johnson's chambers, for his first visit, and found the giant in his den.”

Yet Cowper, who, during so many years, had mixed with such companions on equal terms, and till a time of life in which habits take so strong a hold that they are not easily cast off, had great capabilities for solitude. He could have been contented in a hermitage, if his mind had been delivered from the one illusion that oppressed it. There was an activity in his disposition, like that of a happy child, who having no playmate, is left to devise amusement for itself. As soon as he began to recover, his first care had been to seek employment, and this he found in carpentering, in cage-making, in gardening, and in drawing, till he discovered "that writing, and especially poetry, was the best remedy for that distress from which he sought to escape!" Many persons have brought on insanity by indulging in habits which excite its predisposing causes, and after temporary recoveries have induced a fresh access by the same imprudence; but Cowper's admirable selfmanagement during the intervals which it pleased Providence to vouchsafe, is not the least remarkable point in his extraordinary case.

Yet though he could bear shade and retirement, he felt that it was good for him to be sometimes in the sunshine of society; and well understood the value of those aids to cheerfulness which come to us from without, or from a distance. "You do well," said he to Unwin, "to make your letters merry ones, though not very merry yourself, and that both for my sake and

your own; for your own sake, because it sometimes happens that by assuming an air of cheerfulness, we become cheerful in reality; and for mine, because I have always more need of a laugh than a cry, being somewhat disposed to melancholy by natural temperament as well as by other causes." It was one of the felicitous incidents of his life that the loss of Lady Austen's society was in some degree immediately supplied by a new acquaintance, which in no long time improved into familiarity, and then ripened into friendship. The Throckmortons had a mansion at Weston. Hitherto Cowper had had no intercourse with the family during the many years that he had resided at Olney; but he had been favoured with a key of their pleasure grounds; and when a new possessor, whom he remembered a boy, came, on the death of an elder brother, to reside there with his wife, he sent a complimentary card and requested a continuance of the privilege he had enjoyed by the favour of his mother, that lady, on the change of possessors, going to finish her days at Bath65. The request was readily granted, and nothing more passed between them for about two years. But even as the lion is proverbially said to be not so fierce as his picture, so a shy man is seldom so shy as his neighbours suppose him to be, when he has once obtained a character for shyness. Deterred by that character from seeking the acquaintance of one whom, in other respects, he already knew how to appreciate, Mr. Throckmorton made no advances till an opportunity offered, in which it might have appeared discourteous not to notice him. Balloons were then the wonder of the day; all the country was invited to see one ascend from Weston, and a special invitation came to Cowper and Mrs. Unwin.

The very feeling in which shyness originates, makes the individual more sensible of any civilities that have an air of sincerity and kindness. "Our reception," says Cowper, "was flattering to a great degree, insomuch that more notice seemed to be taken of us than we could possibly have expected, indeed rather more than any of the other guests; they even

64 May 8, 1784. 65 Sir Robert Throckmorton, the head of the family, then in his eighty-fourth year, resided in Oxfordshire. Though a Romanist, he had "done great things to preserve and restore Buckland (his parish) church."-Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. iii. p. 700. Cowper's friend succeeded to the baronetcy in 1791.

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