Early Life
CHAPTER II.
At Huntingdon--The Unwins
CHAPTER III.
At Olney--Mr. Newton
CHAPTER IV.
Authorship--The Moral Satires
CHAPTER V.
The Task
CHAPTER VI.
Short Poems and Translations
CHAPTER VII.
The Letters
CHAPTER VIII.
Close of Life
COWPER.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY LIFE.
Cowper is the most important English poet of the period between Pope
and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley,
which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution.
As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to
nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of
sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social
system, he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the
revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all. As a
sentimentalist he presents a faint analogy to Rousseau, whom in natural
temperament he somewhat resembled. He was also the great poet of the
religious revival which marked the latter part of the eighteenth
century in England, and which was called Evangelicism within the
establishment and Methodism without. In this way he is associated with
Wesley and Whitefield, as well as with the philanthropists of the
movement, such as Wilberforce, Thornton, and Clarkson. As a poet he
touches, on different sides of his character, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and
Burns. With Goldsmith and Crabbe he shares the honour of improving
English taste in the sense of truthfulness and simplicity. To Burns he
felt his affinity, across a gulf of social circumstance, and in spite
of a dialect not yet made fashionable by Scott. Besides his poetry, he
holds a high, perhaps the highest place, among English letter writers:
and the collection of his letters appended to Southey's biography
forms, with the biographical portions of his poetry, the materials for
a sketch of his life. Southey's biography itself is very helpful,
though too prolix and too much filled out with dissertations for common
readers. Had its author only done for Cowper what he did for Nelson!
[Our acknowledgments are also due to Mr. Benham, the writer of the
Memoir prefixed to the Globe Edition of Cowper.]
William Cowper came of the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle,
after whom he was named, was the Whig Lord Chancellor of Anne and
George I. His grandfather was that Spencer Cowper, judge of the Common
Pleas, for love of whom the pretty Quakeress drowned herself, and who,
by the rancour of party, was indicted for her murder. His father, the
Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was chaplain to George II. His mother was a
Donne, of the race of the poet, and descended by several lines from
Henry III. A Whig and a gentleman he was by birth, a Whig and a
gentleman he remained to the end. He was born on the 15th November
(old style), 1731, in his father's rectory of Berkhampstead. From
nature he received, with a large measure of the gifts of genius, a
still larger measure of its painful sensibilities. In his portrait; by
Romney the brow bespeaks intellect, the features feeling and
refinement, the eye madness. The stronger parts of character, the
combative and propelling forces he evidently lacked from the beginning.
For the battle of life he was totally unfit. His judgment in its
healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his
letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him
incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the
verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it. To the malady
which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English
poets.
At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness
than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In
short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and
God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions
with any saint, in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if
Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good
poetry. But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he
should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the
influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.
The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at
the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the
spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof
of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was
glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in
the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic.
Spiritual religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of
Milton, was almost extinct; there was not much more of it among the
Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a
decided Unitarian tendency. The Church was little better than a
political force, cultivated and manipulated by political leaders for
their own purposes. The Bishops were either politicians or theological
polemics collecting trophies of victory over free-thinkers as titles to
higher preferment. The inferior clergy as a body were far nearer in
character to Trulliber than to Dr. Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful
of their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and pluralities,
fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate
privileges, cold, rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings,
if they preached at all. The society of the day is mirrored in the
pictures of Hogarth, in the works of Fielding and Smollett; hard and
heartless polish was the best of it; and not a little of it was
_Marriage a la Mode_. Chesterfield, with his soulless culture, his
court graces, and his fashionable immoralities, was about the highest
type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses, Potters, and
Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the Hell-fire Club, were
more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the country squires, for
one Allworthy or Sir Roger de Coverley there were many Westerns. Among
the common people religion was almost extinct, and assuredly no new
morality or sentiment, such as Positivists now promise, had taken its
place. Sometimes the rustic thought for himself, and scepticism took
formal possession of his mind; but, as we see from one of Cowper's
letters, it was a coarse scepticism which desired to be buried with its
hounds. Ignorance and brutality reigned in the cottage. Drunkenness
reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling, cockfighting, and
bullfighting were the amusements of the people. Political life, which,
if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made up for the absence of
spiritual influences, was corrupt from the top of the scale to the
bottom: its effect on national character is pourtrayed in Hogarth's
_Election_. That property had its duties as well as its rights, nobody
had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman towards his
own class was to pay his debts of honour and to fight a duel whenever
he was challenged by one of his own order; towards the lower class his
duty was none. Though the forms of government were elective, and
Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election time
obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic, and
each rank was divided from that below it by a sharp line which
precluded brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham to
Lady Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield, "I
thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist
preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured
with disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to
level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to
be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on
the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but
wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at
variance with high rank and good breeding. I shall be most happy to
come and hear your favourite preacher." Her Grace's sentiments towards
the common wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be
sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as
there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which hanged
men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks
and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors,
of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained
tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave trade was
iniquitous hardly any one suspected; even men who deemed themselves
religious took part in it without scruple. But a change was at hand,
and a still mightier change was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's
birth, John Wesley was twenty-eight and Whitefield was seventeen. With
them the revival of religion was at hand. Johnson, the moral reformer,
was twenty-two. Howard was born, and in less than a generation
Wilberforce was to come.
When Cowper was six years old his mother died; and seldom has a child,
even such a child, lost more, even in a mother. Fifty years after her
death he still thinks of her, he says, with love and tenderness every
day. Late in his life his cousin Mrs. Anne Bodham recalled herself to
his remembrance by sending him his mother's picture. "Every creature,"
he writes, "that has any affinity to my mother is dear to me, and you,
the daughter of her brother, are but one remove distant from her, I
love you therefore, and love you much, both for her sake and for your
own. The world could not have furnished you with a present so
acceptable to me as the picture which you have so kindly sent me. I
received it the night before last, and received it with a trepidation
of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt had its
dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it and hung
it where it is the last object which I see at night, and the first on
which I open my eyes in the morning. She died when I completed my
sixth year; yet I remember her well, and am an ocular witness of the
great fidelity of the copy, I remember too a multitude of the maternal
tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her
memory to me beyond expression. There is in me, I believe, more of the
Donne than of the Cowper, and though I love all of both names, and have
a thousand reasons to love those of my own name, yet I feel the bond of
nature draw me vehemently to your side." As Cowper never married,
there was nothing to take the place in his heart which had been left
vacant by his mother.
My mother! when I learn'd that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gayest me, though unfelt, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss--
Ah, that maternal smile!--it answers--Yes.
I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!
But was it such?--It was.--Where thou art gone
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore,
The parting word shall pass my lips no more!
Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern,
Oft gave me promise of thy quick return.
What ardently I wish'd, I long believed,
And disappointed still, was still deceived;
By expectation every day beguiled,
Dupe of to-morrow even from a child.
Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went,
Till, all my stock of infant sorrows spent,
I learn'd at last submission to my lot,
But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot.
In the years that followed no doubt he remembered her too well. At six
years of age this little mass of timid and quivering sensibility was,
in accordance with the cruel custom of the time, sent to a large
boarding school. The change from home to a boarding school is bad
enough now; it was much worse in those days.
"I had hardships," says Cowper, "of various kinds to conflict with,
which I felt more sensibly in proportion to the tenderness with which I
had been treated at home. But my chief affliction consisted in my
being singled out from all the other boys by a lad of about fifteen
years of age as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the
cruelty of his temper. I choose to conceal a particular recital of the
many acts of barbarity with which he made it his business continually
to persecute me. It will be sufficient to say that his savage
treatment of me impressed such a dread of his figure upon my mind, that
I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than to
his knees, and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any
other part of his dress. May the Lord pardon him, and may we meet in
glory!" Cowper charges himself, it may be in the exaggerated style of
a self-accusing saint, with having become at school an adept in the art
of lying. Southey says this must be a mistake, since at English public
schools boys do not learn to lie. But the mistake is on Southey's
part; bullying, such as this child endured, while it makes the strong
boys tyrants, makes the weak boys cowards, and teaches them to defend
themselves by deceit, the fist of the weak. The recollection of this
boarding school mainly it was that at a later day inspired the plea for
a home education in _Tirocinium_.
Then why resign into a stranger's hand
A task as much within your own command,
That God and nature, and your interest too,
Seem with one voice to delegate to you?
Why hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his
The indented stick that loses day by day
Notch after notch, till all are smooth'd away,
Bears witness long ere his dismission come,
With what intense desire he wants his home.
But though the joys he hopes beneath your roof
Bid fair enough to answer in the proof,
Harmless, and safe, and natural as they are,
A disappointment waits him even there:
Arrived, he feels an unexpected change,
He blushes, hangs his head, is shy and strange.
No longer takes, as once, with fearless ease,
His favourite stand between his father's knees,
But seeks the corner of some distant seat,
And eyes the door, and watches a retreat,
And, least familiar where he should be most,
Feels all his happiest privileges lost.
Alas, poor boy!--the natural effect
Of love by absence chill'd into respect.
From the boarding school, the boy, his eyes being liable to
inflammation, was sent to live with an oculist, in whose house he spent
two years, enjoying at all events a respite from the sufferings and the
evils of the boarding school. He was then sent to Westminster School,
at that time in its glory. That Westminster in those days must have
been a scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and
degradation to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the
researches of the Public Schools Commission. There was an established
system and a regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to
have been so unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of
himself as having excelled at cricket and football; and excellence in
cricket and football at a public school generally carries with it,
besides health and enjoyment, not merely immunity from bullying, but
high social consideration. With all Cowper's delicacy and
sensitiveness, he must have had a certain fund of physical strength, or
he could hardly have borne the literary labour of his later years,
especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than
empirical era. At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his
spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a
skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as he was passing through
St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled him to a sense of his
mortality.
The instruction at a public school in those days was exclusively
classical. Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in
some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the
schoolmaster of the last century. "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne.
I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or
any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to
him. I love him too with a love of partiality, because he was usher of
the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so
good-natured and so indolent that I lost more than I got by him, for he
made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted
to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his
person; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for all. .
. . . I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy
locks and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to
write Latin verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very
well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear
witness. Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical
scholar, as classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the
literary form of which the classics are the best school. Out of school
hours he studied independently, as clever boys under the unexacting
rule of the old public schools often did, and read through the whole of
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ with a friend. He also probably picked up at
Westminster much of the little knowledge of the world which he ever
possessed. Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt
as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to
believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be
required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings.
On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr.
Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the
Law. He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to
gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a
recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the
"silver pence" which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at
Westminster School. The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in
Ely Place. His days were spent in "giggling and making giggle" with
his cousins, Theodora and Harriet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in
the neighbouring Southampton Row. Ashley Cowper was a very little man
in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he
would one day he picked by mistake for a mushroom. His fellow-clerk in
the office, and his accomplice in giggling and making giggle, was one
strangely mated with him; the strong, aspiring, and unscrupulous
Thurlow, who though fond of pleasure was at the same time preparing
himself to push his way to wealth and power. Cowper felt that Thurlow
would reach the summit of ambition, while he would himself remain
below, and made his friend promise when he was Chancellor to give him
something. When Thurlow was Chancellor, he gave Cowper his advice on
translating Homer.
At the end of his three years with the attorney, Cowper took chambers
in the Middle, from which he afterwards removed to the Inner Temple.
The Temple is now a pile of law offices. In those days it was still a
Society. One of Cowper's set says of it: "The Temple is the barrier
that divides the City and suburbs; and the gentlemen who reside there
seem influenced by the situation of the place they inhabit. Templars
are in general a kind of citizen courtiers. They aim at the air and
the mien of the drawing-room, but the holy-day smoothness of a
'prentice, heightened with some additional touches of the rake or
coxcomb, betrays itself in everything they do. The Temple, however, is
stocked with its peculiar beaux, wits, poets, critics, and every
character in the gay world; and it is a thousand pities that so pretty
a society should be disgraced with a few dull fellows, who can submit
to puzzle themselves with cases and reports, and have not taste enough
to follow the genteel method of studying the law." Cowper at all events
studied law by the genteel method; he read it almost as little in the
Temple as he had in the attorney's office, though in due course of time
he was formally called to the Bar, and even managed in some way to
acquire a reputation, which when he had entirely given up the
profession brought him a curious offer of a readership at Lyons Inn.
His time was given to literature, and he became a member of a little
circle of men of letters and journalists which had its social centre in
the Nonsense Club, consisting of seven Westminster men who dined
together every Thursday. In the set were Bonnell Thornton and Colman,
twin wits, fellow-writers of the periodical essays which were the rage
in that day, joint proprietors of the _St. James's Chronicle_,
contributors both of them to the _Connoisseur_, and translators, Colman
of Terence, Bonnell Thornton of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist
besides. In the set was Lloyd, another wit and essayist and a poet,
with a character not of the best. On the edge of the set, but
apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was then running a course
which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose verse, sometimes strong but
always turbid, Cowper conceived and retained an extravagant admiration.
Churchill was a link to Wilkes; Hogarth too was an ally of Colman, and
helped him in his exhibition of Signs. The set was strictly confined
to Westminsters. Gray and Mason, being Etonians, were objects of its
literary hostility and butts of its satire. It is needless to say much
about these literary companions of Cowper's youth: his intercourse with
them was totally broken off, and before he himself became a poet its
effects had been obliterated by madness, entire change of mind, and the
lapse of twenty years. If a trace remained, it was in his admiration
of Churchill's verses, and in the general results of literary society,
and of early practice in composition. Cowper contributed to the
_Connoiseur_ and the _St. James's Chronicle_. His papers in the
_Connoisseur_ have been preserved; they are mainly imitations of the
lighter papers of the _Spectator_ by a student who affects the man of
the world. He also dallied with poetry, writing verses to "Delia," and
an epistle to Lloyd. He had translated an elegy of Tibullus when he
was fourteen, and at Westminster he had written an imitation of
Phillips's _Splendid Shilling_, which, Southey says, shows his manner
formed. He helped his Cambridge brother, John Cowper, in a translation
of the _Henriade_. He kept up his classics, especially his Homer. In
his letters there are proofs of his familiarity with Rousseau. Two or
three ballads which he wrote are lost, but he says they were popular,
and we may believe him. Probably they were patriotic. "When poor Bob
White," he says, "brought in the news of Boscawen's success off the
coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy! When Hawke demolished
Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could express my
rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec."
The "Delia" to whom Cowper wrote verses was his cousin Theodora, with
whom he had an unfortunate love affair. Her father, Ashley Cowper,
forbade their marriage, nominally on the ground of consanguinity,
really, as Southey thinks, because he saw Cowper's unfitness for
business and inability to maintain a wife. Cowper felt the
disappointment deeply at the time, as well he might do if Theodora
resembled her sister, Lady Hesketh. Theodora remained unmarried, and,
as we shall see, did not forget her lover. His letters she preserved
till her death in extreme old age.
In 1756 Cowper's father died. There does not seem to have been much
intercourse between them, nor does the son in after-years speak with
any deep feeling of his loss: possibly his complaint in _Tirocinium_ of
the effect of boarding-schools, in estranging children from their
parents, may have had some reference to his own case. His local
affections, however, were very strong, and he felt with unusual
keenness the final parting from his old home, and the pang of thinking
that strangers usurp our dwelling and the familiar places will know us
no more.
Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more,
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way,
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd
In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd.
'Tis now become a history little known,
That once we call'd the pastoral house our own.
Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the
cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of
the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself
only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose
birth had cost their mother's life.
When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the sad
and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad and attempted suicide.
What was the source of his madness? There is a vague tradition that it
arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of
insanity. Hut in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the
kind; his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness
point to nothing worse than general ungodliness and occasional excess
in wine; and the tradition derives a colour of probability only from
the loose lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he
had lived. His virtuous love of Theodora was scarcely compatible with
low and gross amours. Generally, his madness is said to have been
religious, and the blame is laid on the same foe to human weal as that
of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. But when he first went mad, his
conversion to Evangelicism had not taken place; he had not led a
particularly religious life, nor been greatly given to religious
practices, though as a clergyman's son he naturally believed in
religion, had at times felt religious emotions, and when he found his
heart sinking had tried devotional books and prayers. The truth is his
malady was simple hypochondria, having its source in delicacy of
constitution and weakness of digestion, combined with the influence of
melancholy surroundings. It had begun to attack him soon after his
settlement in his lonely chambers in the Temple, when his pursuits and
associations, as we have seen, were far from Evangelical. When its
crisis arrived, he was living by himself without any society of the
kind that suited him (for the excitement of the Nonsense Club was sure
to be followed by reaction); he had lost hiss love, his father, his
home, and as it happened also a dear friend; his little patrimony was
fast dwindling away; he must have despaired of success in his
profession; and his outlook was altogether dark. It yielded to the
remedies to which hypochondria usually yields, air, exercise, sunshine,
cheerful society, congenial occupation. It came with January and went
with May. Its gathering gloom was dispelled for a time by a stroll in
fine weather on the hills above Southampton Water, and Cowper said that
he was never unhappy for a whole day in the company of Lady Hesketh.
When he had become a Methodist, his hypochondria took a religious form,
but so did his recovery from hypochondria; both must be set down to the
account of his faith, or neither. This double aspect of the matter
will plainly appear further on. A votary of wealth when his brain
gives way under disease or age fancies that he is a beggar. A
Methodist when his brain gives way under the same influences fancies
that he is forsaken of God. In both cases the root of the malady is
physical,
In the lines which Cowper sent on his disappointment to Theodora's
sister, and which record the sources of his despondency, there is not a
touch of religious despair, or of anything connected with religion.
The catastrophe was brought on by an incident with which religion had
nothing to do. The office of clerk of the Journals in the House of
Lords fell vacant, and was in the gift of Cowper's kinsman Major
Cowper, as patentee. Cowper received the nomination. He had longed
for the office, sinfully as he afterwards fancied; it would exactly
have suited him and made him comfortable for life. But his mind had by
this time succumbed to his malady. His fancy conjured up visions of
opposition to the appointment in the House of Lords; of hostility in
the office where he had to study the Journals; of the terrors of an
examination to be undergone before the frowning peers. After
hopelessly poring over the Journals for some months he became quite
mad, and his madness took a suicidal form. He has told with unsparing
exactness the story of his attempts to kill himself. In his youth his
father had unwisely given him a treatise in favour of suicide to read,
and when he argued against it, had listened to his reasonings in a
silence which he construed as sympathy with the writer, though it seems
to have been only unwillingness to think too badly of the state of a
departed friend. This now recurred to his mind, and talk with casual
companions in taverns and chophouses was enough in his present
condition to confirm him in his belief that self-destruction was
lawful. Evidently he was perfectly insane, for he could not take up a
newspaper without reading in it a fancied libel on himself. First he
bought laudanum, and had gone out into the fields with the intention of
swallowing it, when the love of life suggested another way of escaping
the dreadful ordeal. He might sell all he had, fly to France, change
his religion, and bury himself in a monastery. He went home to pack
up; but while he was looking over his portmanteau, his mood changed,
and he again resolved on self-destruction. Taking a coach he ordered
the coachman to drive to the Tower Wharf, intending to throw himself
into the river. But the love of life once more interposed, under the
guise of a low tide and a porter seated on the quay. Again in the
coach, and afterwards in his chambers, he tried to swallow the
laudanum; but his hand was paralysed by "the convincing Spirit," aided
by seasonable interruptions from the presence of his laundress and her
husband, and at length he threw the laudanum away. On the night before
the day appointed for the examination before the Lords, he lay some
time with the point of his penknife pressed against his heart, but
without courage to drive it home. Lastly he tried to hang himself; and
on this occasion he seems to have been saved not by the love of life,
or by want of resolution, but by mere accident. He had become
insensible, when the garter by which he was suspended broke, and his
fall brought in the laundress, who supposed him to be in a fit. He
sent her to a friend, to whom he related all that had passed, and
despatched him to his kinsman. His kinsman arrived, listened with
horror to the story, made more vivid by the sight of the broken garter,
saw at once that all thought of the appointment was at end, and carried
away the instrument of nomination. Let those whom despondency assails
read this passage of Cowper's life, and remember that he lived to write
_John Gilpin_ and _The Task_.
Cowper tells us that "to this moment he had felt no concern of a
spiritual kind;" that "ignorant of original sin, insensible of the
guilt of actual transgression, he understood neither the Law nor the
Gospel, the condemning nature of the one, nor the restoring mercies of
the other." But after attempting suicide he was seized, as he well
might be, with religious horrors. Now it was that he began to ask
himself whether he had been guilty of the unpardonable sin, and was
presently persuaded that he had, though it would be vain to inquire
what he imagined the unpardonable sin to be. In this mood, he fancied
that if there was any balm for him in Gilead, it would be found in the
ministrations of his friend Martin Madan, an Evangelical clergyman of
high repute, whom he had been wont to regard as an enthusiast. His
Cambridge brother, John, the translator of the _Henriade_, seems to
have had some philosophic doubts as to the efficacy of the proposed
remedy; but, like a philosopher, he consented to the experiment. Mr.
Madan came and ministered, but in that distempered soul his balm turned
to poison; his religious conversations only fed the horrible illusion.
A set of English Sapphics, written by Cowper at this time, and
expressing his despair, were unfortunately preserved; they are a
ghastly play of the poetic faculty in a mind utterly deprived of
self-control, and amidst the horrors of inrushing madness. Diabolical,
they might be termed more truly than religious.
There was nothing for it but a madhouse. The sufferer was consigned to
the private asylum of Dr. Cotton, at St. Alban's. An ill-chosen
physician Dr. Cotton would have been, if the malady had really had its
source in religion; for he was himself a pious man, a writer of hymns,
and was in the habit of holding religious intercourse with his
patients. Cowper, after his recovery, speaks of that intercourse with
the keenest pleasure and gratitude; so that in the opinion of the two
persons best qualified to judge, religion in this case was not the
bane. Cowper has given us a full account of his recovery. It was
brought about, as we can plainly see, by medical treatment wisely
applied; but it came in the form of a burst of religious faith and
hope. He rises one morning feeling better; grows cheerful over his
breakfast, takes up the Bible, which in his fits of madness he always
threw aside, and turns to a verse in the Epistle to the Romans.
"Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full beams of the
Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the
atonement He had made, my pardon in His blood, and the fulness and
completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed and received
the Gospel." Cotton at first mistrusted the sudden change, but he was
at length satisfied, pronounced his patient cured, and discharged him
from the asylum, after a detention of eighteen months. Cowper hymned
his deliverance in _The Happy Change_, as in the hideous Sapphics he
had given religious utterance to his despair.
The soul, a dreary province once
Of Satan's dark domain,
Feels a new empire form'd within,
And owns a heavenly reign.
The glorious orb whose golden beams
The fruitful year control,
Since first obedient to Thy word,
He started from the goal,
Has cheer'd the nations with the joys
His orient rays impart;
But', Jesus, 'tis Thy light alone
Can shine upon the heart.
Once for all, the reader of Cowper's life must make up his mind to
acquiesce in religious forms of expression. If he does not sympathize
with them, he will recognize them as phenomena of opinion, and bear
them like a philosopher. He can easily translate them into the
language of psychology, or even of physiology, if he thinks fit.