neighbors nearly, and as nearly resembles the scenery of Catfield; but with what different perceptions does it present me! The reason is obvious. My state of mind is a medium though which the beauties of Paradise itself could not be communicated with any effect but a painful one.

There is a wide interval between us, which it would be far easier for you than for me to pass. Yet I should in vain invite you. We shall meet no more. I know not what Mr. Johnson said of me in the long letter he addressed to you yesterday, but nothing, I am sure, that could make such an event seem probable. I remain as usual,

dear cousin,

yours,

WM. COWPER.

Toward the close of the year, his old, and kind, and highly esteemed friend, Sir John Throckmorton, who was then on a visit to Lord Petre, rode over to see him. Cowper manifested no pleasure at his sight; yet he mentioned him to Lady Hesketh in the following letter, as if he had beheld him with more interest than he had expressed:

DEAR COUSIN,

Dereham, Dec. 8, 1798

If I gave you your copy of the verses you mention, I do not know how it should be imperfect; nor, if you made" it yourself, how it should be so defective as to require my corrections. If any stanza, ending with the words inserted in your letter to Mr. Johnson, was omitted, it is also omitted. in the copy that is here, and it is utterly impossible that I should now replace it, incapable as I am of recollecting a single stanza of the whole. The copy that is in Mr. Johnson's possession he will send to-morrow.

I give all my miserable days to the revisal of Homer, and often many hours of the night to the same hopeless employment; hopeless on every account; both because myself am such while engaged in it, and because it is in vain that I bestow any labor at all upon it, on account of the unforeseen impossibility of doing justice to a poet of such great antiquity in a modern language, and in a species of

metre far less harmonious than that of the original. That, under such disabling circumstances, and in despair both of myself and of my work, I should yet attend to it, and even feel something like a wish to improve it, would be unintelligible to me, if I did not know that my volitions, and consequently my actions, are under a perpetual irresistible influence. Whatever they were in the earlier part of my life, that such they are now, is, with me, a matter of every day's experience.

This doctrine I once denied, and even now assert the truth of it respecting myself only. There can be no peace where there is no freedom; and he is a wretch indeed who is a necessitarian by experience.

Sir John Throckmorton was here this day se'nnight, much altered since I saw him last, more than I should have thought possible in so short a time, yet not so much but that I should have known him any where. His horse had fallen under hin on his way hither, and perhaps he had received more hurt than he acknowledged, which might have some effect in the alteration of his looks that I have mentioned.

It is little worth while to return to the subject of Homer; but I will just add, that I have proceeded in the revisal as far, and somewhat farther than the fifteenth book of the Odyssey. I remain, dear cousin,

yours as usual,

WM. COWPER.

Mr. Johnson desires me to tell you, that this being Sunday, he has no time to finish his letter to-day, but will send it by the post of to-morrow

Thus the year 1798 closed. On the eighth of the following March he completed the revisal of his Homer, began a preface to the new edition the next morning, and on the day after concluded it. He was then without employment; and when Mr. Johnson, on the day following, laid the commencement of his intended poem on the Four Ages before him, he corrected a few lines, and added two or three more. The will was not wanting; but he felt too surely that the time for such an undertaking had gone

by, and he declined to proceed with it, saying, "it was too great a work for him to attempt in his present situation." Not that he failed in resolution, for no man ever struggled more perseveringly against the pressure of mental disease, nor perhaps, considering the peculiar character of that disease, with such admirable judgment; not that his intellectual powers were in the slightest degree impaired ; but he was now an old man; and nature was preparing to deliver him from the body of that death, in which his gentle spirit had so long and so severely suffered.

That evening at supper, other projects of easier accomplishment were suggested to him. He objected to them all, but at length observed, that he had just thought of six Latin verses, and if he could compose any thing, it must be in pursuing that composition. Accordingly, the next morning, his desk was opened for him, and all things duly arranged; he then committed to paper the commencement of his poem on the Ice Islands; and soon afterwards translated it, at Miss Perowne's request, into English. It was then recollected, that when they were at Dunham Lodge, an account of these islands had been read to him in one of the Norwich papers, though it had not seemed to engage his notice at the time. On the day after this translation was made, he wrote The Cast-away, founded upon an incident related in Anson's Voyages. It is the last original piece that he composed, and, all circumstances considered, one of the most affecting that ever was composed.

VOL. II.

THE CAST-AWAY.

OBSCUREST night involved the sky!
Th' Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I,
Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home forever left.

No braver chief could Albion boast,
Than he, with whom he went,
Nor ever ship left Albion's coast,
With warmer wishes sent.

He loved them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again.

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Not long beneath the whelming brine,
Expert to swim, he lay ;

Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
Or courage die away;

But waged with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair of life.

He shouted: nor his friends had failed
To check the vessel's course;
But so the furious blast prevailed,
That, pitiless perforce,

They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.

Some succor yet they could afford;
And, such as storms allow,

The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
Delayed not to bestow;

But he (they knew) nor ship nor shore, Piri

Whate'er they gave, should visit more.

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I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date:

But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Hayley has remarked how providentially friend after friend was raised up for Cowper as he needed them, and that in his darkest seasons of calamity he was never without some affectionate attendant. He speaks of Miss Perowne, and Mr. Johnson vouches for the truth of the description, as one of those excellent beings whom nature seems to have formed expressly for the purpose of alleviating the sufferings of the afflicted, tenderly vigilant in providing for the wants of sickness, and resolutely firm in administering such relief as the most intelligent compassion can supply.' Notwithstanding the great aversion which he had latterly had to medicine, Cowper would take it from her hands, and he preferred her assistance to that of any other person. He was not less fortunate in his kinsman. "I never saw,' says Hayley, "the human being that would, I think, have sustained the delicate and arduous office in which Mr. Johnson persevered to the last, through a period so long, with an equal portion of unvaried tenderness and unshaken fidelity. A man who wanted sensibility would have renounced the duty; and a man endowed with a particle too much must have felt his own health utterly undermined by an excess of sympathy with the sufferings perpetually in his sight."

The last reading to which Cowper listened appears to have been that of his own works. Beginning with the first volume, Mr. Johnson went through them, and he listened to them in silence till they came to John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. It reminded him of cheerful