POETICAL EPISTLE TO LADY AUSTEN.

To your intrinsic merit true,
When called to address myself to you.

Mysterious are his ways whose power
Brings forth that unexpected hour,
When minds, that never met before,
Shall meet, unite, and part no more:
It is the allotment of the skies,
The hand of the Supremely Wise,

us,

That guides and governs our affections,
And plans and orders our connexions:
Directs us in our distant road,
And marks the bounds of our abode.
Thus we were settled when you found
Peasants and children all around us,
Not dreaming of so dear a friend,
Deep in the abyss of Silver-End.*
Thus Martha,† even against her will,
Perched on the top of yonder hill;
And you, though you must needs prefer
The fairer scenes of sweet Sancerre,‡
Are come from distant Loire to choose
A cottage on the banks of Ouse.
This page of providence quite new,
And now just opening to our view,
Employs our present thoughts and pains:
To guess and spell what it contains:
But day by day, and year by year,
Will make the dark enigma clear;

* An obscure part of Olney, adjoining to the residence of Cowper, which faced the market-place.

† Mrs. Jones, Lady Austen's sister, wife of the Rev. Thomas Jones, curate of Clifton Reynes, who was one of the six students expelled from St. Edmund Hall in 1768.

Lady Austen's residence in France.

And furnish us, perhaps, at last,
Like other scenes already past,
With proof, that we, and our affairs,
Are part of a Jehovah's cares:
For God unfolds by slow degrees
The purport of his deep decrees;
Sheds every hour a clearer light
In aid of our defective sight;

And spreads, at length, before the soul
A beautiful and perfect whole,
Which busy man's inventive brain
Toils to anticipate in vain.

Say, Anna, had you never known
The beauties of a rose full blown,
Could you, though luminous your eye,
By looking on the bud, descry,
Or guess, with a prophetic power,
The future splendour of the flower?
Just so the Omnipotent, who turns
The system of a world's concerns,
From mere minutiæ can educe
Events of most important use;
And bid a dawning sky display
The blaze of a meridian day.

The works of man tend, one and all,
As needs they must, from great to small!
And vanity absorbs at length

The monuments of human strength.
But who can tell how vast the plan
Which this day's incident began?
Too small, perhaps, the slight occasion
For our dim-sighted observation;

It passed unnoticed, as the bird
That cleaves the yielding air unheard,
And yet may prove, when understood,
A harbinger of endless good.

Not that I deem, or mean to call,
Friendship a blessing cheap or small:
But merely to remark, that ours,
Like some of Nature's sweetest flowers,
Rose from a seed of tiny size,

That seemed to promise no such prize;
A transient visit intervening,

And made almost without a meaning,
(Hardly the effect of inclination,
Much less of pleasing expectation)
Produced a friendship, then begun,
That has cemented us in one;

And placed it in our power to prove,
By long fidelity and love,

That Solomon has wisely spoken;

"A threefold cord is not soon broken." *

90

95

100

105

17th Dec. 1781.

* Eccles. iv. 12.

THE FLATTING MILL.

AN ILLUSTRATION.*

ZHEN a bar of pure silver or ingot of gold

W

Is sent to be flatted or wrought into
length,

It is passed between cylinders often, and rolled
In an engine of utmost mechanical strength.

Thus tortured and squeezed, at last it appears
Like a loose heap of ribbon, a glittering show,
Like music it tinkles and rings in your ears,
And, warmed by the pressure, is all in a glow.

This process achieved, it is doomed to sustain
The thump after thump of a gold-beater's mallet,
And at last is of service in sickness or pain
To cover a pill for a delicate palate.

Alas for the poet! who dares undertake
To urge reformation of national ill-

His head and his heart are both likely to ache
With the double employment of mallet and mill.

5

11

15

* Written in December, 1781, with a view to insertion in Cowper's first volume of Poems; but not being thought suitable by Newton, it stood over, and was never published until 1815, when Dr. John Johnson included it in his vol. III. of the Poems, 8vo. p. 111; 12mo. p. 79.

If he wish to instruct, he must learn to delight, Smooth, ductile, and even his fancy must flow, Must tinkle and glitter like gold to the sight, And catch in its progress a sensible glow.

20

After all he must beat it as thin and as fine
As the leaf that enfolds what an invalid swallows;
For truth is unwelcome, however divine,

And unless you adorn it, a nausea follows.

ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE,

WRITTEN WHEN THE NEWS ARRIVED, BY DESIRE
OF LADY AUSTEN, WHO WANTED WORDS
TO THE MARCH IN SCIPIO.*

POLL for the brave!

R

The brave that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!

Eight hundred of the brave,
Whose courage well was tried,
Had made the vessel heel,
And laid her on her side.

We have collated our

*Hayley, 1803, vol. 1. p. 126. copy with Cowper's manuscript, which is now Additional MS. British Museum, 24,155, folio 40. The incident commemorated in these solemn lines occurred on the 29th August, 1782.