every day--each petty object of external observation or inward suggestion, is there chronicled with a fine and female fondness, a wise and happy faculty, let us say, of deriving a gentle happiness from the tranquil and passing hour. The fortunes of the hares-Bess who died young, and Tiney who lived to be nine years old the miller who engaged their affections at once, his powdered coat having charms that were irresistible-the knitting-needles of Mrs. Unwin-the qualities of his friend Hill, who managed his money transactions "An honest man, close buttoned to the chin, live in his pages, and were the natural, insensible, unbiassed occupants of his fancy. It is easy for a firm and hard mind to despise the minutiae of life, and to pore and brood over an abstract proposition. It may be possible for the highest, the strongest, the most arduous imagination to live aloof from common things-alone with the unseen world, as some lived their whole lives in memory with a world which has passed away. But it seems hardly possible that an imagination such as Cowper's, which was rather a detective fancy, perceiving the charm and essence of things which are seen, than an eager, actuating, conceptive power embodying, enlivening, empowering those which are not seen, should leave its own home-the domus et tellus-the sweet fields and rare orchards which it loved, and go out alone apart from all flesh into the trackless and fearful and unknown Infinite. Of course, his timid fancy shrank from it at once, and returned to its own fireside. After a little, the idea that he had a true faith faded away. Mr. Newton, with misdirected zeal, sought to revive it by inciting him to devotional composition; but the only result was the volume of "Olney Hymns"-a very painful record, of which the burden is "My former hopes are fled, Ah, whither shall I fly? I hear the thunder roar; The law proclaims destruction nigh, And vengeance at the door." The Preacher" himself did not conceive such a store of melancholy forebodings. The truth is, that there are two remarkable species of minds on which the doctrine of Calvinism is a deadly and fatal poison. One is the natural, vigorous, bold, defiant, hero-like character, abounding in generosity, in valour, in vigour, and abounding also in self-will, and pride, and scorn. This is the temperament which supplies the world with ardent hopes and keen fancies, with springing energies, and bold plans, and noble exploits; but yet, under another aspect and in other times, is equally prompt in desperate deeds, awful machinations, deep and daring crimes. It one day is ready by its innate heroism to deliver the world from any tyranny; the next it "hungers to become a tyrant" in its turn. Yet the words of the poet are ever true and are ever good, as a defence against the cold narrators who mingle its misdeeds and exploits, and profess to believe that each is a set off and compensation for the other. "Still he retained, 'Mid much abasement, what he had received From Nature, an intense and glowing mind." It is idle to tell such a mind that by an arbitrary irrespective election it is chosen to happiness or doomed to perdition. The evil and the good in it equally revolt at such terms. It thinks, "Well, if the universe be a tyranny, if one man is doomed to misery for no fault, and the next is chosen to pleasure for no merit-if the favouritism of time be copied into eternity-if the highest heaven be indeed like the meanest earth, then, as the heathen say, it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, better to be the victims of the eternal despotism than its ministers, better to curse in hell than serve in heaven." And the whole burning soul breaks away into what is well called Satanism--into wildness, and bitterness, and contempt. Cowper had as little in common with this proud Titanic aspiring genius as any man has or can have, but his mind was equally injured by the same system. On a timid, lounging, gentle, acquiescent mind, the effect is precisely the contrarysingularly contrasted but equally calamitous. "I am doomed, you tell me, already. One way or other the matter is already settled. It can be no better, and it is as bad as it can be. Let me alone; do not trouble at least these few years. Let me at least sit sadly and bewail myself. Action is useless. I will brood upon my melancholy and be at rest ;" the soul sinks into "passionless calm and silence unreproved," flinging away "the passionate tumult of a clinging hope, which is the allotted boon and happiness of mortality. It was, as we believe, straight towards this terrible state that Mr. Newton directed Cowper. He kept him occupied with subjects which were too great for him; he kept him away from his natural life; he presented to him views and opinions but too well justifying his deep and dark insanity; he convinced him that he ought to experience emotions which were foreign to his nature; he had nothing to add by way of comfort when told that those emotions did not and could not exist. Cowper seems to have felt this. His second illness commenced with a strong dislike to his spiritual adviser, and it may be doubted if there ever was again the same cordiality between them. Mr. Newton, too, as was natural, was vexed at Cowper's calamity. His reputation in the "religious world" was deeply pledged to conducting this most "interesting case" to a favourable termination. A failure was not to be contemplated, and yet it was obviously coming and coming. It was to no purpose that Cowper acquired fame and secular glory in the literary world. This was rather adding gall to bitterness. The unbelievers in evangelical religion would be able to point to one at least, and that the best known among its proselytes, to whom it had not brought peace whom it had rather confirmed in wretchedness. His literary fame, too, took Cowper away into a larger circle, out of the rigid decrees and narrow ordinances of his father-confessor, and of course the latter remonstrated. Altogether there was not a cessation, but a decline and diminution of intercourse. But better, as Lord Brougham used to say in divorce cases, had they never met or never parted. If a man is to have a father-confessor, let him at least choose a sensible one. The dominion of Mr. Newton had been exercised, not indeed with mildness, or wisdom, or discrimination, but, nevertheless, with strong judgment and coarse acumen-with a bad choice of ends, but at least a vigorous selection of means. Afterwards it was otherwise. In the village of Olney there was a schoolmaster, whose name often occurs in Cowper's letters, a foolish, vain, worthy sort of man: what the people of the west call a scholard," that is, a man of more knowledge and less sense than those about him. He sometimes came to Cowper to beg old clothes, sometimes to instruct him with literary criticisms, and is known in the " Correspondence" as "Mr. Teedon, who reads the Monthly Review," "Mr. Teedon whose smile is fame." Yet to this man, whose harmless follies his humour had played with a thousand times, Cowper, in his later years, and when the dominion of Mr. Newton had so far ceased as to leave him, after many years, the use of his own judgment, resorted for counsel and guidance. And the man had visions, and dreams, and revelations!! But enough of such matters. 66 The peculiarity of Cowper's life is its division into marked periods. From his birth to his first illness he may be said to have lived in one world, and for some twenty years afterwards, from his thirty-second to about his fiftieth year, in a wholly distinct one, and much of that time was spent in hopeless despondency. His principal companions during that time were Mr. Newton, about whom we have been writing, and Mrs. Unwin, who may be said to have broken the charmed circle of seclusion in which they lived by inciting Cowper to continuous literary composition. Of Mrs. Unwin herself ample memorials remain. She was, in truth, a most excellent person-in truth and years much older than the poet-as it were by profession elderly, able in every species of preserve, profound in salts, and pans, and jellies; culinary by taste; by tact and instinct motherly and housewifish. She was not, however, without some less larderiferous qualities. Lady Hesketh and Lady Austen, neither of them very favourably-prejudiced critics, decided so. The former has written," She is very far from grave; on the contrary, she is cheerful and gay, and laughs de bon cœur upon the smallest provocation. Amidst all the little puritanical words which fall from her de tems en tems, she seems to have by nature a great fund of gaiety. I must say, too, that she seems to be very well read in the English poets, as appears by several little quotations which she makes from time to time, and has a true taste for what is excellent in that way." This she showed by persuading Cowper to the composition of his first volume. As a poet, Cowper belongs, though with some differences, to the school of Pope. Great question, as is well known, has been raised whether that very accomplished writer was a poet at all; and a secondary and equally debated question runs side by side, whether, if a poet, he were a great one. With the peculiar genius and personal rank of Pope we have in this article nothing to do. But this much may be safely said, that according to the definition which has been adventured of the poetical art, by the greatest and most accomplished of the other school, his works are delicately-finished specimens of artistic excellence in one branch of it. "Poetry," says Shelley, who was surely a good judge, "is the expression of the imagination," by which he meant of course not only the expression of the interior sensations accompanying the faculty's employment, but likewise, and more emphatically, the exercise of it in the delineation of objects which attract it. Now society, viewed as a whole, is clearly one of those objects. There is a vast assemblage of human beings, of all nations, tongues, and languages, each with ideas and a personality and a cleaving mark of its own, yet each having somewhat that resembles something of all, much that resembles a part of many-a motley regiment, of various forms, of a million impulses, passions, thoughts, fancies, motives, actions; a "many-headed monstered thing;" a Bashi Bazouk array; a clown to be laughed at; a hydra to be spoken evil of; yet, in fine, our all-the very people of the whole earth. There is nothing in nature more attractive to the fancy than this great spectacle and congregation. Since Herodotus went to and fro to the best of his ability over all the earth, the spectacle of civilization has ever drawn to itself the quick eyes and quick tongues of seeing and roving men. Not only, says Goethe, is man ever interesting to man, but "properly there is nothing else interesting." There is a distinct subject for poetry-at least according to Shelley's definition-in selecting and working out, in idealizing, in combining, in purifying, in intensifying the great features and peculiarities which make society as a whole, interesting, remarkable, fancy-taking. No doubt it is not the object of poetry to versify the works of the eminent narrators, "to prose," according to a disrespectful description, "o'er books of travelled seamen," to chill you with didactic icebergs, to heat you with torrid sonnets. The difficulty of reading such local narratives is now great-so great that a gentleman in the reviewing department once wished "one man would go everywhere and say everything," in order that the limit of his labour at least might be settled and defined. And it would certainly be much worse if palm trees were of course to be in rhyme, and the dinner of the migrator only recountable in blank verse. We do not wish this. We only maintain that there are certain principles, causes, passions, affections, acting on and influencing communities at large, permeating their life, ruling their principles, directing their history, working as a subtle and wandering principle over all their existence. These have a somewhat abstract character, as compared with the soft ideals and passionate incarnations of purely individual character, and seem dull beside the stirring lays of eventful times, in which the earlier and bolder poets delight. The tendency of civilization is to pare away the oddness and license of personal character, and to leave a monotonous agreeableness as the sole trait and comfort of mankind. And this very effect obviously tends to increase the efficacy of general principles, to bring to view the daily efficacy of constant causes, to suggest the hidden agency of subtle abstractions. Accordingly as civilization augments and philosophy grows, we commonly find a school common-sense poets," as they may be called, arise and develop, who proceed to describe what they see around them, to describe its natura naturans, to delineate its natura naturata, of 66 |