From ass's milk, of which he began a course on the 21st of June in this year, he gained a considerable acquisition of bodily strength, and was enabled to bear an airing in an open carriage, before breakfast, with Mr. Johnson. A depression of spirits, which suspended the studies of a writer so eminently endeared to the public, was considered by men of piety and learning as a national misfortune, and several individuals of this description, though personally unknown to Cowper, wrote to him, in the benevolent hope that expressions of friendly praise, from persons who could be influenced only by the most laudable motives in bestowing it, might reanimate the dejected spirit of a poet not sufficiently conscious of the public service that his writings had rendered to his country, and of that universal esteem which they had so deservedly secured to their author. I cannot think myself authorised to mention the names of all who did honour to Cowper, and to themselves, on this occasion, but I trust the Bishop of Landaff will forgive me, if my sentiments of personal regard towards him induce me to take an affectionate liberty with his name, and to gratify myself by recording, in these pages, a very pleasing example of his liberal attention to the interests of humanity. He endeavoured evangelically to cheer and invigorate the mind of Cowper, but the depression of that mind was the effect of bodily disorder so obstinate, that it received not the slightest relief from what, in a season of corporeal health, would have afforded the most animated gratification to this interesting invalid. The pressure of his malady had now made him utterly deaf to the most honourable praise. He had long discontinued the revisal of his Homer, but by the entreaty of his young kinsman he was persuaded to resume it in September, 1797, and he persevered in it, oppressed as he was by indisposition. To watch over the disordered health of afflicted genius, and to lead a powerful, but dejected spirit by gentle encouragement to exert itself in salutary occupation, is an office that requires a very rare union of tenderness, intelligence, and fortitude. To contemplate and minister to a great mind in a state that borders on mental desolation, is like surveying, in the midst of a desert, the tottering ruins of palaces and temples, where the faculties of the spectator are almost absorbed in wonder and regret, and where every step is taken with awful apprehension. It seemed as if Providence had expressly formed the young kinsman of Cowper to prove exactly such a guardian to his declining years as the peculiar exigencies of his situation required. I never saw the human being that could, I think, have sustained the delicate and arduous office (in which the inexhaustible virtues of 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 of that valuable, though perilous, quality, must have felt his own health utterly undermined by an excess of sympathy with the sufferings perpetually in his sight. Mr. Johnson has completely discharged, perhaps, the most trying of human duties; and I trust he will forgive me for this public declaration, that in his mode of discharging it he has merited the most cordial esteem from all who love the memory of Cowper. Even a stranger may consider it as a strong proof of his tender dexterity in soothing and guiding the afflicted poet, that he was able to engage him steadily to pursue and finish the revisal and correction of his Homer, during a long period of bodily and mental sufferings, when his troubled mind recoiled from all intercourse with his most intimate friends, and laboured under a morbid abhorrence of all cheerful exertion. But in deploring the calamity of my friend, and describing the merit of his affectionate attendant, I must not forget, that it is still incumbent on me, as a faithful biographer, to notice a few circumstances in the dark and distressful years that Cowper had yet to linger on earth. In the summer of 1798, Mr. Johnson was induced to vary his plan of remaining for some months in the marine village. of Mundsley, and thought it more eligible for the invalid to make frequent visits from Dereham to the coast, passing a week at a time by the sea-side. Cowper, in his poem on Retirement, seems to inform us what his own sentiments were, in a season of health, concerning the regimen most proper for the disease of melancholy. Virtuous and faithful Heberden, whose skill The frequent change of place, and the magnificence of marine scenery, produced at times a little relief to his depressive sensations. On the 7th of June, 1798, he surveyed the light-house at Happisburgh, and expressed some pleasure on beholding, through a telescope, several ships at a distance. Yet in his usual walk with Mr. Johnson by the sea-side, he exemplified, but too forcibly, his own affecting description of melancholy silence. That silent tongue Could give advice, could censure, or commend, But this description is applicable only in the more oppressive preceding years, for of the summer 1798 Mr. Johnson says-"We had no longer air and exercise alone, but exercise and Homer hand in hand." On the 24th of July, Cowper had the honour of a visit from a lady for whom he had long entertained affectionate respect, the Dowager Lady Spencer-and it was rather remarkable, that, on the very morning she called upon him, he happened to have begun his revisal of the Odyssey, which he had originally inscribed to her. Such an incident, in a happier season, would have produced a very enlivening effect on his spirits; but, in his present state, it had not even the power to lead him into any free conversation with his amiable visiter. The only amusement that he appeared to admit without reluctance was the reading of Mr. Johnson, who, indefatigable in the supply of such amusement, had exhausted an immense collection of novels; and at this period began reading to the poet his own works. To these he listened also in silence, and heard all his poems recited in order, till the reader arrived at the history of John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. Mr. Johnson proceeded to his manuscript poems to these he willingly listened, but made not a single remark on any. In October, 1798, the pressure of his melancholy seemed to be mitigated in some little degree, for he exerted himself as far as to write, without solicitation, to Lady Hesketh; and I insert passages of this letter, because, gloomy as it is, it describes in a most interesting manner the sudden attack of his malady; and tends to confirm an opinion that his mental disorder arose from a scorbutic habit, which, when his perspiration was obstructed, occasioned an un-, searchable obstruction in the finer parts of his frame. Such a cause would produce, I apprehend, an effect exactly like what my suffering friend describes in this letter. DEAR COUSIN, You describe delightful scenes, but you describe them to one, who, if he even saw them, could receive no delight from them: who has a faint recollection, and so faint as to be like an almost forgotten dream, that once he was susceptible of pleasure from such causes, The country that you have had in prospect has been always famed for its beauties; but the wretch who can derive no gratification from a view of nature, even under the disadvantage of her most ordinary dress, will have no eyes to admire her in any. In one day, in one minute I should rather have said, she became an universal blank to me; and though from a different cause, yet with an effect as difficult to remove as blindness itself. On his return from Mundsley to Dereham, in an evening towards the end of October, Cowper, with Miss Perowne, and Mr. Johnson, was overturned in a post chaise:-he discovered no terror on the occasion, and escaped without injury from the accident. In December he received a visit from his highly-esteemed friend, Sir John Throckmorton; but his malady was at that time so oppressive, that it rendered him almost insensible to the kind solicitude of friendship. He still continued to exercise the powers of his astonishing mind. On Friday evening, the 8th of March, 1799, he completed his revisal of the Odyssey, and the next morning wrote part of a new preface. When he had concluded his Homer, Mr. Johnson endeavoured in the gentlest manner to lead him into new literary occupation. For this purpose on the 11th of March he laid before him the paper containing the commencement of his poem on The Four Ages. Cowper altered a few lines; he also added a few, but soon observed to his kind attendant-"That it was too great a work for him to attempt in his present situation." At supper Mr. Johnson suggested to him several literary projects that he might execute more easily. He replied-"That he had just thought of six Latin verses, and if he could compose anything it must be in pursuing that composition.' The next morning he wrote the six verses he had mentioned, and added a few more, entitling the poem Montes Glaciales. It proved a versification of a circumstance recorded in a newspaper, which had been read to him a few weeks before, without his appearing to notice it. This poem he translated into English verse, on the nineteenth of March, to oblige Miss Perowne. Both the original and the translation appear in the Appendix. On the twentieth of March he wrote the stanzas entitled The Castaway, founded on an anecdote in Anson's Voyage, which his memory suggested to him, although he had not looked into the book for many years. As this poem is the last original production from the pen of Cowper, I shall introduce it here, persuaded that it will be read with an interest proportioned to the extraordinary pathos of the subject, and the still more extraordinary powers of the poet, whose lyre could sound so forcibly, unsilenced by the gloom of the darkest distemper, that was conducting him, by slow gradations, to the shadow of death. THE CAST-AWAY. Obscurest night involved the sky, No braver chief could Albion boast He loved them both, but both in vain, Not long beneath the whelming brine, Nor soon he felt his strength decline, But waged with death a lasting strife, He shouted: nor his friends had fail'd They left their outcast mate behind, Some succour yet they could afford; The cask, the coop, the floated cord, But he (they knew) nor ship nor shore, Nor, cruel as it seeem'd, could he He long survives, who lives an hour And so long he, with unspent pow'r, And ever, as the minutes flew, At length, his transient respite past, No poet wept him; but the page That tells his name, his worth, his age, And tears by bards or heroes shed I therefore purpose not, nor dream, To give the melancholy theme |