to get at them. Both your mother's constitution and mine have suffered materially by such close and long confinement; and it is high time, unless we intend to retreat into the grave, that we should seek out a more wholesome residence. So far is well; the rest is left to Heaven."

To his friend Mr. Newton, he thus writes:-"You have heard of our intended removal. The house that is to receive us is in a state of preparation, and when finished, will be both smarter and more commodious than our present abode. But the circumstance that recommends it chiefly is its situation. Long confinement in the winter, and indeed, for the most part in the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravelwalk, thirty yards long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year, during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner. Had I been confined in the Tower, the battlements of it would have furnished me with a larger space. You say well, that there was a time when I was happy at Olney; and I am now as happy at Olney, as I expect to be anywhere, without the presence of God. Change of situation is with me no otherwise an object, than as both Mrs. Unwin's health and my own happen to be concerned in it. We are both I believe partly indebted for our respective maladies, to an atmosphere encumbered with raw vapors, issuing from flooded meadows, and we have perhaps fared the worse for sitting so often, and sometimes for several successive months, over a cellar filled with water. These ills we shall escape in the uplands; and as we may reasonably hope, of course, their consequences. But as for happiness, he that once had communion with his Maker, must be more frantic than ever I was yet, if he can dream of finding it at a distance from him. I no more expect happiness at Weston than here, or than I should expect it in company with felons and outlaws in the hold of a ballast-lighter. Animal spirits, however, have their value, and are especially desirable to him who is condemned to carry a burden which at any rate will tire him, but which without their aid, cannot fall to crush him."

On the 15th November, 1786, Cowper entered upon his new abode. The following extracts from his letters describe his sensations on the occasion:-"There are some things that do not exactly shorten the life of man, yet seem to do so, and frequent removals from place to place are of that number For my own part, at least, I am apt to think, if I had been

more stationary, I should seem to myself to have lived longer. My many changes of habitation have divided my time into many short periods; and when I look back upon them, they appear only as the stages of a day's journey, the first of which is at no great distance from the last. I lived longer at Olney than anywhere. There indeed I lived till mouldering walls and a tottering house warned me to depart. I have accordingly taken the hint, and two days since arrived, or rather took up my abode, at Weston. You perhaps have never made the experiment, but I can assure you that the confusion that attends a transmigration of this kind is infinite, and has a terrible effect in deranging the intellect. When God speaks to a chaos, it becomes a scene of order and harmony in a moment;. but when his creatures have thrown one house into, confusion by leaving it, and another by tumbling themselves and their goods into it, not less than many days' labor and contrivance are necessary to give them their proper places. And it belongs to furniture of all kinds, however convenient it may be in its place, to be a nuisance out of it. We find ourselves here in a comfortable house. Such it is in itself; and my cousin, who has spared no expense in dressing it up for us, has made it a genteel one. Such, at least, it will be, when its contents are a little harmonized. She left us on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Mrs. Unwin and I took possession of our new abode. I could not help giving a last look to my old prison, and its precincts; and though I cannot easily account for it, having been miserable there so many years, felt something like a heart-ache, when 1 took my leave of a scene, that certainly in itself had nothing to engage affection. But I recollected that I had once been happy there, and could not, without tears in my eyes, bid adieu to a place in which God had so often found me. human mind is a great mystery; mine, at least, appears to be such upon this occasion. I found that I not only had a tenderness for that ruinous abode, because it had once known me happy in the presence of God, but that even the distress I had there suffered, for so long a time, on account of his absence, had endeared it to me as much. I was weary of every object, had long wished for a change, yet could not take leave without a pang at parting. What consequences are to attend our removal, God only knows. I know well that it is not in the power of situation to effect a cure of melancholy like mine. The change, however, has been entirely a providential one; for much as I wished it, I never uttered that

The

wish, except to Mrs. Unwin. When I learned that the house was to be let, and had seen it, I had a strong desire that Lady Hesketh should take it for herself, if she should happen to like the country. That desire, indeed, is not exactly fulfilled, and yet, upon the whole, is exceeded. We are the tenants; but she assures us that we shall often have her for a guest, and here is room enough for us all. You, I hope, my dear friend, and Mrs. Newton, will want no assurances to convince you that you will always be received here with the sincerest welcome; more welcome than you have been you can not be, but better accommodated you may and will be."

CHAPTER XI.

Extracts from his correspondence-Description of the deep seriousness that generally pervaded his mind-His remarks to justify his removal from Olney-Vindicates himself and Mrs. Unwin from unjust aspersions-Reasons for undertaking the translation of Homer-His opinion of Pope's-Unremitting attention to his own-Immense pains he bestowed upon it-His readiness to avail himself of the assistance of others -Vexation he experienced from a multiplicity of critics-Just remarks upon criticism--Determination to persevere in his work--Justi. fies himself for undertaking it-Pleasure he took in relieving the poor --Renewal of his correspondence with General Cowper and the Rev. Dr. Bagot--Consolatory letter to the latter.

THE extracts we have already made from Cowper's correspondence prove, unquestionably, that the leading bias of his mind was towards the all-important concerns of religion. As an exhibition, however, of the state of his mind in this respect, at least, up to the close of 1786, the period of his removal to Weston, we think the following extracts cannot fail to be interesting. To Mr. Newton he writes as follows: "Those who enjoy the means of grace, and know how to use them well, will thrive anywhere; others nowhere. More than a few, who were formerly ornaments of this garden, which you once watered, here flourished, and have seemed to wither, and become, as the apostie James strongly expresses it-twice dead-plucked up by the roots; others transplanted into a soil, apparently less favorable to their

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growth, either find the exchange an advantage, or at least, are not injured by it. Of myself, who had once both leaves and fruit, but who have now neither, I say nothing, or only this—that when I am overwhelmed with despair, I repine at my barrenness, and I think it hard to be thus blighted; but when a glimpse of hope breaks in upon me, I am then contented to be the sapless thing I am, knowing that he who has commanded me to wither, can command me to flourish again when he pleases. My experiences, however, of this latter kind, are rare and transient. The light that reaches me cannot be compared either to that of the sun, or of the moon; it is a flash in a dark night, during which the heavens seem opened only to shut again. I should be happy (and when I say this, I mean to be understood in the fullest and most emphatical sense of the word) if my frame of mind were such as to permit me to study the important truths of religion. But Adam's approach to the tree of life, after he had sinned, was not more effectually prohibited by the flaming sword that turned every way, than mine to its great Antitype has been now almost these thirteen years, a short interval of three or four days, which passed about this time twelvemonth, alone excepted. For what reason I am thus long excluded, if I am ever again to be admitted, is known to God only. I can say but this, that if he is still my father, his paternal severity has, toward me, been such as to give me reason to account it unexampled. For though others have suffered desertion, yet few, I believe, for so long a time, and perhaps none a desertion accompanied with such experience. But they have this belonging to them: that as they are not fit for a recital, being made up merely of infernal ingredients, so neither are they susceptible of it, for I know no language in which they could be expressed. They are as truly things which it is not possible for man to utter, as those were which Paul heard and saw in the third heaven. If the ladder of Christian experience reaches, as I suppose it does, to the very presence of God, it has nevertheless its foot in the abyss. And if Paul stood, as no doubt he did, on the topmost stave of it, I have been standing, and still stand, on the lowest, in this thirteenth year that has passed since I descended. In such a situation of mind, encompassed by the midnight of absolute despair, and a thousand times filled with unspeakable horror, I first commenced an author. Distress drove me to it; and the impossibility of existing without some employment, still recommends it. I am not, in

deed, so perfectly hopeless as I was, but I am equally in need of an occupation, being often as much, and sometimes even more, worried than ever. I cannot amuse myself as I once could with carpenters' or with gardeners' tools, or with squirrels and guinea-pigs. At that time I was a child; but since it has pleased God, whatever else he withholds from me, to restore to me a man's mind, I have put away childish things. Thus far, therefore, it is plain that I have not chosen, or prescribed to myself, my own way, but have been providentially led to it; perhaps I might say, with equal propriety, compelled and scourged into it: for certainly could I have made my choice, or were I permitted to make it even now, those hours which I spend in poetry I would spend with God. But it is evidently his will that I should spend them as I do, because every other way of employing them he himself continues to make impossible. The dealings of God with me are to myself utterly unintelligible. I have never met, either in books, or in conversation, with an experience at all similar to my own. More than twelve months have now passed since I began to hope, that having walked the whole breadth of the bottom of this Red Sea, I was beginning to climb the opposite shore, and I prepared to sing the song of Moses. But I have been disappointed; those hopes have been blasted; those comforts have been wrested from me. I could not be so duped even by the arch-enemy himself as to be made to question the divine nature of them, but I have been made to believe (which you will say is being duped still more) that God gave them to me in derision, and took them away in vengeance. Such, howeyer, is, and has been my persuasion many a long day; and when I shall think on this subject more comfortably, or as you will be inclined to tell me, more rationally and scripturally, I know not. In the mean time I embrace, with alacrity, every alleviation of my case, and with the more alacrity, because, whatever proves a relief of my distress is a cordial to Mrs. Unwin, whose sympathy with me, through the whole of it, has been such, that despair excepted, her burthen has been as heavy as mine."

Some of his friends, and Mr. Newton among the rest, on being apprized of his intended removal from Olney, expressed apprehensions that it would introduce him to company, uncongenial to his taste, if not detrimental to his piety. Adverting to these objections, he thus writes to his esteemed correspondent: If in the course of such an occupation as I have been driven to by despair, or by the inevitable conse