erary way this half year, and through mere incapacity and lowness of spirits, have been obliged to neglect it. In other days it would have cost me but a single morning. Last night I received a letter from bin requiring it speedily; and this morning I awoke out of a dream that has disabled me more than ever. I would relate it, but have not time: its teudency, however, was to inculcate the doctrine of difficulties to be surmounted by unassisted me, and therefore insurmountable. "These experiences kill all the little comfort which the present moment, though bad, yet not so bad as I am made to expect, might otherwise yield me. Time passes: I have many things to do, one of them arduous indeed; I mean Milton. God is silent; prayer obtains no answer; one discouragement treads on the heels of another, and the consequence is, that I do nothing but prognosticate my own destruction." The next is in a still more unhappy strain.3 "Dear sir, nothing new has occurred in my experience since we saw you, one circumstance excepted, of the distressing kind. I have often told you that the notices given to you come to me unattended by any sensible effect; yet, believing that they are from God, and gracious answers to your prayers, I have been accustomed to lean a little upon them, and have been the better enabled to sustain the constant pressure of my burdens. But of late I have been totally deprived even of that support, having been assured that though they are indeed from God, so far from being designed as comforts to me, to me they are reproaches, biting sarcasms, sharp strokes, of irony, in short, the deadliest arrows to be found in the quiver of the Almighty. To you indeed they are manna, and to Mrs. Unwin, because you are both at peace with God; but to me, who have unpardonably offended him, they are a cup of deadly wine, against which there is no antidote. So the cloudy pillar was light to Israel, but darkness and horror to Egypt. "I have nothing in the shape of an answer to this suggestion. My experience, the desertion that I endure, my frequent agonies of despair, all tend to give it credit and -- confirmation. Why have they never given me, in any single instance, the least sensible comfort? Do they not profess to have me for their object? And yet I alone re ceive no benefit from them. "This has much the appearance under which I have been taught to view them; and those in particular which seemed to encourage me in my work, and to promise me success if I attempted it, have been twice demonstrated to have no such meaning, or not to have meant it seriously, by the complete failure of my endeavors. "In other respects I am much as usual, and so is Mrs. Unwin, except that this sad and dreary season is hurtful to us both, by confining us." Even, however, at this time he could still interest himself upon that great work which had afforded him constant and happy occupation during so many years. When he told Hayley that his idleness, or more truly his difficulties, were proof against all the exhortations that he received from Eartham, he added,35 "Something indeed I do. 1 play at push-pin with Homer every morning before breakfast, fingering and polishing as Paris did his armor." Johnson had said that the translation would "begin to be reviewed in the next Analytical, and that he hoped the reviewal would not offend him." "By this," said Cowper, "I understand that, if I am not offended, it will be owing more to my own equanimity than to the mildness of the critic. So be it! He will put an opportunity of victory over myself into my hands, and I will endeavor not to lose it." This, however, was no effort of self-command in him; for though well pleased with praise, there is not in his letters a single passage from which it can be inferred that he was at any time annoyed by censure. The reason wherefore private criticism vexed him when it recommended alterations in his unpublished poems was, that it put him, in many cases, to unprofitable trouble, and perhaps required him, in some, to yield his own judgment, rather than contend for things trifling in single instances, but in the whole of a composition of more importance than persons not accustomed to the art of poetry themselves can easily be made to understand. 35 Jan. 28. He had now some prospect of profiting by his past labors. Johnson had proposed not only to print a handsome quarto edition of his poems in two volumes, but to make him a present of the entire profits. This was intended to accompany a second edition of his Homer, and Abbot's portrait was to be engraved for it. Cowper demurred at the portrait. "Johnson's plan," said he to Mr. Rose,36 "of prefixing my phiz to the new edition of my poems is by no means a pleasant one to me; and so I told him in a letter I sent him from Eartham, in which I assured him that my objections to it would not be easily surmounted. But you judge that it may really have an effect in advancing the sale, I would not be so squeamish as to suffer the spirit of prudery to prevail in me to his disadvantage. Somebody told an author, (I forget whom,) that there was more vanity in refusing his picture than in granting it; on which he instantly complied. I do not perfectly feel all the force of the argument; but it shall content me that he did." At the winding up his accounts for the Homer, (which Mr. Rose transacted for him,) he says,37 "Few of my concerns have been so happily concluded. I am now satisfied with my bookseller, as I have substantial cause to be, and account myself in good hands-a circumstance as pleasant to me as any other part of the business; for I love dearly to be able to confide with all my heart in those with whom I am connected, of what kind soever the connection may be." On this occasion it appears that Johnson's intentions were carried into effect in a different way from what he had proposed, but equally to Cowper's satisfaction. Writing to his cousin of Norfolk, he says,38 The long muster-roll of my great and small ancestors I signed, and dated, and sent up to Mr. Blue-mantle on Monday, according to your desire. Such a pompous affair drawn out for my sake, reminds me of the old fable of the mountain in parturition, and a mouse the produce. Rest undisturbed, say I, their Jordly, ducal, and royal dust! Had they left me something handsome, I should have respected them more. But perhaps they did not know that such a one as I should have the honor to be numbered among their descendants. Well! 38 April 11. 38 Nov. 9, 1792. 37 March 27. I have a little bookseller that makes me some amends for this deficiency. He has made me a present an act of liberality which I take every opportunity to blazcn, as it well deserves." Lady Hesketh had been prevented from making her autuminal visit by the state of her health, which rendered it advisable for her to pass some time at Bath. "You know not what you lose," Cowper says to her,39" by being absent from Weston at this moment. We have just received from Johnny a cask of the best Holland gin; and in a few days I shall receive from Charlotte Smith a present of her novel, not yet published, entitled the Old Manor House, in three volumes. How happy wouldst thou find thyself in the enjoyment of both these articles at once!" In a like cheerful strain he thanks his Norfolk kinsman for other presents of a different kind; one of which, neither Norfolk, nor Salisbury Plain, nor perhaps any part of England, could at this time supply. TO JOHN JOHNSON, ESQ. Io Paan! MY DEAREST JOHNNY, Even as you foretold, so it came to pass. Jan. 31, 1793. On Tuesday I received your letter, and on Tuesday came the pheasants; for which I am indebted in many thanks, as well as Mrs. Unwin, both to your kindness and to your kind friend Mr. Copeman. In Copeman's ear this truth let Echo tell, Our friends the Courtenays have never dined with us since their marriage, because we have never asked them; and we have never asked them, because poor Mrs. Unwin is not so equal to the task of providing for and entertaining company as before this last illness. But this is no objection to the arrival here of a bustard; rather it is a cause for which we shall be particularly glad to see the monster. It will be a 39 Jan. 19. handsome present to them. So let the bustard come, as the Lord Mayor of London said of the hare, when he was hunting, "Let her come, a' God's name! afraid of her!" I am not Adieu, my dear cousin and caterer. My eyes are terribly bad; else I had much more to say to you. Ever affectionately yours, W. C. On the second day only after this sportive letter had been written, the insane mind predominated again, and he wrote thus to Teedon : 40 "It is with great unwillingness that I write, knowing that I can say nothing but what will distress you. I despair of every thing, and my despair is perfect, because it is founded on a persuasion that there is no effectual help for me, even in God. "From four this morning till after seven, I lay meditating terrors, such terrors as no language can express, and as no heart, I am sure, but mine ever knew. My very finger-ends tingled with it, as indeed they often do. I then slept, and dreamed a long dream, in which I told Mrs. U. with many tears that my salvation is impossible, for the reason given above. I recapitulated, in the most impassioned accent and manner, the unexampled severity of God's dealings with me in the course of the last twenty years, especially in the year 73, and again in 86, and concluded all with observing that I must infallibly perish, and that the Scriptures which speak of the insufficiency of man to save himself can never be understood unless I perish. "I then made a sudden transition in my dream to one of the public streets in London, where I was met by a dray; the forehorse of the team came full against me, and in violent anger I damned the drayman for it. "Such are my nocturnal experiences, and my daily ones are little better.-I know that I have much fever, but it is a fever for which there is no cure, and is as much the afflictive hand of God upon me, as any other circumstance of my distress. 40 Feb. 2, 1793. |