lyre," in Cowper's library. Who was this American genius, one wonders? There were English poets, too, of course; and among prose works, we hear of Johnson's Rambler, Addison, Burke, Gibbon, and Junius. Altogether a respectable, if modest, collection. But it is time to go back to our story. This happy season was not to last for ever. The beginning of the change came at the end of 1791, when Mrs. Unwin had a slight fit, which was followed by a paralytic stroke in the following spring. Hayley was happily with Cowper at the time of the second attack, and threw all his ardent kindliness into the work of helping and comforting his new friend. The acquaintance had grown out of the fact that they were both engaged on Milton, and it ripened so fast that, in the second letter he wrote to Hayley, Cowper is already exclaiming “Utrumque nostrum incredibili modo Consentit astrum:" and it was not three months from the beginning of their correspondence before Hayley was at Weston; or, what was much more astonishing, five months before Cowper and Mrs. Unwin were Hayley's guests in Sussex. We may sometimes smile at Hayley's unrestrained enthusiasms, and rather fussy and unpractical activities; but the new friend proved a very true one, and every lover of Cowper has a kindly feeling for him. It is to him we owe by far the most striking of the Cowper portraits-that by Romney. It was, at least in part, to his unwearying efforts that Cowper owed the pension of £300 a year which was granted to him in the spring of 1794. But by that time he was not even in a condition to open the letter from Lord Spencer which announced it; and it had to be made payable to his friend Samuel Rose as his trustee. The mere knowledge of the illness of Mrs. Unwin, who had grown steadily worse, would in itself have been a great trial to him: but the form it took made it more than that. She who had been the support and comfort of his life became its daily burden. From thinking only of him, she thought only of herself, and exacted attentions from him to which neither his mental nor bodily strength was equal. He responded as nobly to her need as she had to his no word of complaint escaped him, and he would refuse her nothing she asked; but he paid for his devotion with his reason, and perhaps his life. A peculiarly sad feature of these last years was the intimate connection that gradually grew up between the poet and the Olney schoolmaster Teedon, already alluded to. Mr. Wright, to whose industry lovers of Cowper owe so much, has, with a lack of judgment absolutely amazing, spoken of this person as the greatest influence in Cowper's life.* The fact is, of course, that, on the Cowper who lives, he had no influence whatever. While Cowper was well in body and sane in mind, he laughed at Teedon. When his health was gone and his mind going, he grew to think of *See his Life of Cowper, pp. 14, 377. the foolish creature as an oracle. That fancy was simply part of his disease, and has no other importance. The record of Cowper's relations with Teedon is, in fact, of interest only from the point of view of the study of pathology. Mr. Wright, who talks of "the famous Teedon's Diary," rejoices that he has been able to print seventy-three letters to Teedon in his edition of Cowper's letters. It would be almost as reasonable to rejoice over printing, if we had them to print, all the crazy utterances which must have fallen from the poet's lips every day during his attacks of insanity. Teedon had the kindest intentions, but it is evident his head was turned by the vanity of becoming a kind of spiritual director to such a man as Cowper. For several years he and the poet exchanged a frequent correspondence, communicating to each other the "notices," as they called them, which they imagined themselves to receive, and fancied to be of Divine origin. Of course Teedon's notices were mainly or entirely of the encouraging sort; but the benefit Cowper could receive from these unfulfilled predictions was trifling, while the injury done by his finding a correspondent with whom he could dwell on the features of his disease is beyond calculation. The only people who could really help him were the cheerful friends, Lady Hesketh, and Hayley, and Johnson, and the rest, who kept his mind, as far as might be, away from the delusions altogether. Nothing could have been worse for him than to obtain a correspondent to whom he could write such miserable ravings as "I waked, saying, ‘I shall perish;' which was immediately answered by a vision of a wine-glass and these words, 'a whole glass.'" And such things are the staple of the Teedon correspondence which, though generally sober and natural in form, is almost entirely insane in substance. Meanwhile of Teedon himself it is only necessary to add that, in addition to the passages which Southey and even Mr. Wright himself have quoted to prove the opinion held of him by Cowper in his happier days, there is an unpublished passage in the letter to Hill, of June 29, 1785, which is even more conclusive than they. It is the letter which begins, "I write in a nook that I call my Bouderie” (not Boudoir, as printed in all the editions); and the passage is amusing enough to be worth quoting. He is praising the Bouderie, and says, "It is secure from all noise, and a refuge from all intrusion; for intrusions sometimes trouble me even at Olney. I have never lived, I believe it is impossible to live, where they can be altogether evaded. At Berkhampstead I was haunted by the younger Harcourt, in the Temple by T. White, Esq., at Weymouth by Mr. Foy, and at Olney I have a Mr. Teedon to dread, who in his single person includes the disagreeables of them all. He is the most obsequious, the most formal, the most pedantic of all creatures, so civil that it would be cruel to affront him, and so troublesome that it is impossible to bear him. Being possessed of a little Latin, he seldom uses a word that is not derived from that language, and, being a bigot to propriety of d pronunciation, studiously and constantly lays the accent upon the wrong syllable. I think that Sheridan would adore him. He has formed his style (he told me so himself) by the pattern that Mr. Hervey has furnished him with in his Theron and Aspasio; accordingly, he never says that my garden is gay, but that the flowery tribe are finely variegated and extremely fragrant. The weather with him is never fine, but genial; never cold and uncomfortable, but rigorous and frowning. If he cannot recollect a thing, he tells me that it is not within his recognizance, convincing me at the same time that the orthography of the word is quite familiar to him by laying a particular stress upon the g In short, he surfeits me whenever I am so unhappy as to encounter him, which is too often my lot in the winter, but, thanks to my Bouderie, I can hide myself from him now. A poet's retreat is sacred.” When it is added that Lady Hesketh writes in the margin of this, "A most exact picture of the person in question," and that, in the verses already alluded to, which describe Johnson's first sight of him, he is throughout spoken of with goodnatured contempt, and Cowper is made to address him as "good Teedon," the real opinion held of him by the poet and his friends will be plain enough. No The Teedon letters extend over a period of two years and a half, from August, 1791, to June, 1794. I have seen the originals of all but two or three of the seventy-three Mr. Wright has printed, and his text appears to be generally, though not invariably, accurate. How far the catastrophe which brought the correspondence to an end was its direct or indirect result, no one can now say; but the unhappy fact is that in January, 1794, Cowper's madness returned, and of the remaining six years of his life we have only about a dozen letters, all of the most despondent sort. He would sit for days without uttering a word, and almost without touching food. devotion of friends could comfort him; but what it could do, it did. Lady Hesketh, herself in indifferent health, was with him and Mrs. Unwin at Weston Lodge, from November, 1793, to the summer of 1795; Hayley paid them several visits; and John Johnson, the cousin already mentioned, of whom Cowper had grown very fond, and whose family still bear the poet's name, and own his portrait and some of his manuscripts, played an ever-increasing part in the sad work of looking after the unhappy couple. Since his first coming over from Cambridge in 1790, he had often stayed at Weston, had copied bits of Homer, and had secured subscribers at Cambridge for the translation. He now undertook to render a last heroic service, the only one that seemed to promise any hope for the unhappy poet. In July, 1795, he persuaded Cowper and Mrs. Unwin to come with him to Norfolk. Cowper was sunk in the profoundest despair, but he did not refuse to perform the journey when the day came, July 28th. It was intended to be only a visit, but they never returned to Weston. Mr. Johnson's unselfish affection spared no effort in the hope of Cowper's restoration; but, though he had his better days as well as his worse, nothing approaching health or happiness, or hope, ever came to him again. He and Mrs. Unwin both remained under the care of this most devoted of cousins till the end, which came to her in December, 1796, and to Cowper on April 25, 1800. Both are buried in the church of East Dereham, the quiet country town in which they died. Before that little chapel, where he lies, had received the dust which makes it still a place of pilgrimage, greater masters had arisen, at whose mightier touch those very strings that had been pressed by Cowper's gentle fingers were already yielding richer and stronger music. His own publisher, Johnson, had issued two volumes for Wordsworth in 1793, and in 1798 a provincial publisher produced the little book in which a few keen eyes detected the future fame, not only of Wordsworth, but of Coleridge. And if even before Cowper died greater men than he were already occupying the poetic stage, the years that followed his death saw it more crowded than it has ever been in our history. The "Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared in 1805, and “Marmion" in 1808; the first half of "Childe Harold" took England by storm in 1812; in 1818 Keats published "Endymion," and in 1819 Shelley published the "Prometheus Unbound." Never, perhaps, in our literary history have forty years seen so great a change. When Cowper sent the "Task" to London, he found the field open and empty, and at once received the prize which there was no rival to claim. Within twenty years of his death he was thrown irretrievably into the background by men of greater power, wider range, and profounder depth. Yet no one who really knows him has ever doubted for a moment the permanency of his place on the roll of our poets. To read him is still, to-day as always, to feel one's self in the presence of one of the most delightful of human beings. It is true that, when we come to go through his work in the order of its appearance, we see that this is an impression which could only grow up gradually. The stream of poetry is at first too thin to be easily recognized, and it is only after travelling some way with it, and watching it broaden out into the noble river of the "Task," that we can look back and trace its presence from the very beginning. His second volume is the key to his first; and, as to the peculiar charm of his personality, that could not be perfectly realized till the publication of his exquisite letters. But when we look back from our present vantage ground, all is there from the first, to be found by searching, imbedded even in the rather arid sermons of the volume of 1782. Still more easily is it to be found in the youthful pieces which were not printed till after his death, but now naturally come first in collections of his poems. The germ of the future poet, of himself and not another, of both his strength and weakness, is visible almost at once. The very first piece, the verses written at Bath when he was only seventeen, shows already the love and imitation of Milton, the only poet he ever deliberately copied: there is the direct parody in the first few lines; and there is, in the second half of the piece, the hint of the manner seen afterwards in the weaker places of the "Task,” that of a Milton come down from the heights, and not quite sure whether he has taken the tragic buskin off or not; there is the peculiar clumsiness of his later work, like a parody of Homer," the cobbler, leather-carving artist;" there is his own padding, to be excused in a verse-making boy, but less excusable in the author of the “Task,” and there is also already his own excellent line— "Drags the dull load of disappointment on.' Travel a very little further, only to the verses which begin "Grant me the Muse. He already knows himself to be poet, not of the "tall Parnassian cliff," but of the "still Lethæan lake:" his Muse is one of quiet places, one whose "slow pinions brush the silent shore." The lines to Richardson, again, anticipate the poet who was, like Richardson himself, always and everywhere a preacher. And the various pieces addressed to Delia, his only love poems, are the proof, in their solitariness, of his perfect sincerity, for they are addressed to his only love: and in their note, one not so much of passion as of a peculiarly intimate tenderness, are a foretaste of the lines to Mary and to his mother's picture. "Oh! then indulge thy grief, nor fear to tell The gentle source from whence thy sorrows flow; Every line comes from the heart and goes to it. Cowper is nowhere more a poet than in the best of these pieces, and nowhere more himself. In the beautiful stanzas “Bid adieu, my sad heart, bid adieu to thy peace! we already hear the pensive melancholy of the 'Shrubbery,' and we get even the very measure of that later and better-known farewell "The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.” |