"I thank you for your two last. Delay is no denial indeed; but in extremities such as mine, it is very severe and hard to bear."

He now expressed his concern lest the schoolmaster's health should suffer, by the earnest solicitude, and the frequent mortification and disappointments which he underwent on his account. "But if God indeed employ you," said he,41 and if he himself interest you in my cause, as I trust he does, then all fear is groundless." He tells him that finding his nights intolerable, he had again had recourse to a few drops of laudanum, and had been somewhat relieved; but spiritual relief seemed as distant as ever. "While I can amuse myself with a pen or a book, I am easy; but the moment I lay them down, I begin instantly to ruminate on the various experiences of the last twenty years, and among them find a multitude that seem absolutely and forever to forbid all hope of mercy. Some of them are indeed so emphatically forbidding, that unless it shall please God himself to explain them to a different sense, and to a sense of which they do not appear to be susceptible, I know not how it is possible that I should ever hope again; at least with steadfastness. While they are out of my mind, I may perhaps have something like a hope; but on the instant of recollection, even the strongest confidence must yield. For, though all things are possible to God, it is not possible that He should save whom he has declared he will destroy."

The next is a more remarkable communication.42

"Dear sir, my experience since I saw you affords, on recollection, nothing worthy to be sent to Olney, except the following notice, which I commit to writing; and communicate as a kind of curiosity, rather than for any other reason; though Milton, who is at present an interesting character to us both, is undoubtedly the subject of it.

"I waked the other morning with these words distinctly spoken to me

"Charles the Second, though he was or wished to be accounted a man of fine taste and an admirer of the Arts,

never saw or expressed a wish to see the man whom he would have found alone superior to all the race of man.'

"But in such a notice as this, I find nothing to comfort, nothing spiritual. A thousand such would do me no real service. A single word of Christ is worth all that can be said, either by men or angels, concerning all the men of genius that ever lived; but such word I seldom hear."

In this instance Cowper perceived of what materials his morning experiences were made; but if he had been more capable of reasoning justly upon that perception, any such approach to sanity would have been counteracted by the belief which Mrs. Unwin now, as well as the poor schoolmaster, entertained in the dangerous superstition that possessed him. He could write sanely and playfully about his dreams at this very time to Hayley.43 O, you rogue," he says to him, "what would you give to have such a dream about Milton, as I had about a week since? I dreamed that being in a house in the city, and with much company, looking towards the lower end of the room from the upper end of it, I descried a figure, which I immediately knew to be Milton's. He was very gravely, but very neatly attired in the fashion of his day, and had a countenance which filled me with those feelings that an affectionate child has for a beloved father; such, for instance, as Tom has for you. My first thought was wonder, where he could have been concealed so many years; my second, a transport of joy to find him still alive; my third, another transport to find myself in his company; and my fourth, a resolution to accost him. I did so, and he received me with a complacence, in which I saw equal sweetness and dignity. I spoke of his Paradise Lost, as every man must, who is worthy to speak of it at all, and told him a long story of the manner in which it affected me, when I first discovered it, being at that time a schoolboy. He answered me by a smile, and a gentle inclination of his head. He then grasped my hand affectionately, and with a smile that charmed me said, 'Well, you for your part will do well also.' At last, recollecting his great age, (for I understood him to be two hundred years old,) I feared that I might fatigue him by

43 Feb. 24.

much talking; I took my leave, and he took his with an air of the most perfect good-breeding. His person, his features, his manner, were all so perfectly characteristic, that I am persuaded an apparition of him could not represent him more completely. This may be said to have been one of the dreams of Pindus; may it not?"

Cowper saw clearly here that this was such a dream as his daily thoughts were likely to produce, only in its way, "a kind of curiosity,' "" "one of the dreams of Pindus.' But he received as mysterious all that bore, or could be made to bear, relation to the single point on which his mind was diseased. "In less than a week," he says to Teedon,44 "I was visited with a horrible dream, in which I seemed to be taking a final leave of my dwelling, and every object with which I have been most familiar, on the evening before my execution. I felt the tenderest regret at the separation, and looked about for something durable to carry with me as a memorial. The iron hasp of the garden-door presenting itself, I was on the point of taking that; but recollecting that the heat of the fire in which I was going to be tormented would fuse the metal, and that it would therefore only serve to increase my insupportable misery, I left it. I then awoke in all the horror with which the reality of such circumstances would fill me."

In another communication he says,45 "A temporary suspension of terror was audibly announced to me some time since, and except in one or two instances, has been fulfilled; but in other respects I perceive no difference. Neither waking nor sleeping have I any communications from God, but am perfectly a withered tree, fruitless and leafless. A consciousness that He exists, that once He favored me, but that I have offended to the forfeiture of all such mercies, is ever present with me; and of such thoughts consists the whole of my religious experiences."

This interval was, as might be expected, of no long continuance; and he informs Teedon that the return of those terrible impressions had been announced to him in these words

"I have got my old wakings again!""

"If they continue, they will completely disqualify me for all sorts of writing. It was owing to them that I was idle all the winter, which has thrown me behind to such a degree, that I am now always in a hurry. In short, I find so little done in answer to so many prayers, and for the accomplishment of so many promises, of which I have now almost four quarto volumes, that I am perfectly at a loss to understand the dispensation. The peace of three persons at least is concerned, and yet all remains as it was. Many years I have been threatened with a season worse than all the past, a season that shall be fatal and final; and still I am threatened with such a season. My only hope is founded in Mrs. Unwin's acceptableness with God, and yours. For as to my own, unconnected with my interest in her prayers and yours, I have too mean an opinion of it to suppose that I can build at all upon it.

"In the winter I expected to be crushed before spring, and now I expect to be crushed before winter. I were better never to have been born than to live such a life of terrible expectation."

He now dreamed that Dr. Kerr prescribed death to him, as the only preventive of madness;-the only cure for it, in his case, it now too surely was! -"Your experiences," he says to Teedon,46 “have a difference in them. If you are cast down, you are comforted and raised again. But as for mine, they proceed in one dull train, unvaried, unless sometimes by darker shades than usual. Thus it has happened to me since I saw you. During two days I rejected entirely all your notices; and if I have since experienced some little degree of belief in them, it has not been on account of the smallest encouragement, for I have received none; but perhaps because the temptation to cast them away is apated."

And now Cowper began to think it "strange that the prayers and promises of some years should remain still so entirely unanswered and unaccomplished; and that his own experience and the schoolmaster's should make a series of exact contradictions. You," said he,47 "receive assur

46 March 30.

66

47 May 16.

ances almost as often as you pray, of spiritual good things intended for me; and I feel in the mean time every thing that denotes a man an outcast and a reprobate. I dream in the night that God has rejected me finally, and that all promises and all answers to prayer made for me are mere delusions. I wake under a strong and clear conviction that these communications are from God, and in the course of the day nothing occurs to invalidate that persuasion. As I have said before, there is a mystery in this matter that I am not able to explain. I believe myself the only instance of a man to whom God will promise every thing, and perform nothing."

This was a notion over which he had brooded for the last seven years, and he reasoned upon it thus to the poor simple man whom he had chosen, not for his philosopher, but in a certain sense for his guide and friend. 48. I have already told you that I heard a word in the year 86, which has been a stone of stumbling to me ever since. It was this

"I will promise you any thing.'

"This word, taken in connection with my experience, such as it has been ever since, seems so exactly accomplished, that it leaves me no power at all to believe the promises made to you. You will tell me that it was not from God. By what token am I to prove that? My experience verifies it. In the day I am occupied with my studies, which, whatever they are, are certainly not of a spiritual kind. In the night I generally sleep well, but wake always under a terrible impression of the wrath of God, and for the most part with words that fill me with alarm, and with the dread of woes to come. What is there in all this that in the least impeaches the truth of the threatening I have mentioned? I will promise you any thing: that is to say, much as I hate you, and miserable as I design to make you, I will yet bid you be of good cheer and expect the best, at the same time that I will show you no favor. This, you will say, is unworthy of God. Alas! He is the fittest to judge what is worthy of him, and what is otherwise. I can say but this, that his conduct and dealings are totally changed

49 July 2.