Endur'd affliction's desolating hail, For all who read his verse revere her name. It might have been anticipated that the death of Mrs. Unwin, in Cowper's enfeebled state, would have proved too severe a shock to his agitated nerves. But it is mercifully ordained that, while declining years incapacitate us for trials, they, at the same time, weaken the sensibility to suffering, and thereby render us less accessible to the influence of sorrow. It may be regarded as an instance of providential mercy to this afflicted poet, that his aged friend, whose life he had so long considered as essential to his own, was taken from him at a time when the pressure of his malady, a perpetual low fever, both of body and mind, had, in a great degree, diminished the native energy of his faculties and affections. Owing to these causes, Cowper was so far preserved in this season of trial, that, instead of mourning the loss of a person in whose life he had seemed to live, all perception of that loss was mercifully taken from him; and, from the moment when he hurried away from the inanimate object of his filial attachment, he appeared to have no memory of her having existed, for he never asked a question concerning her funeral, nor ever mentioned her name. Towards the summer of 1797, his bodily health appeared to improve, but not to such a degree as to restore any comfortable activity to his mind. In June he wrote a brief letter to Hayley, but such as too forcibly expressed the cruelty of his distemper. The process of digestion never passed regularly in his frame during the years that he resided in Norfolk. Medicine appeared to have little or no influence on his complaint, and his aversion at the sight of it was extreme. From asses' milk, of which he began a course on the twenty-first 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 mind, 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 re-animate his dejected spirit. Among these might be enumerated Dr. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, who kindly addressed him in the language of encouragement and of soothing consolation; but 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, when his kinsman, dreading the effect of the cessation of bodily exercise upon his mind during a long winter, resolved, if possible, to en gage him in the revisal of this work. One morning, therefore, after breakfast, in the month of September, he placed the Commentators on the table, one by one; namely, Villoisson, Barnes, and Clarke, opening them all, together with the poet's translation, at the place where he had left off a twelvemonth before, but talking with him, as he paced the room, upon a very different subject, namely, the impossibility of the things befalling him which his imagination had represented; when, as his companion had wished, he said to him, " And are you sure that I shall be here till the book you are reading is finished?" "Quite sure," replied his kinsman, "and that you will also be here to complete the revisal of your Homer," pointing to the books, "if you will resume it to-day." As he repeated these words he left the room, rejoicing in the wellknown token of their having sunk into the poet's mind, namely, his seating himself on the sofa, taking up one of the books, and saying in a low and plaintive voice, "I may as well do this, for I can do nothing else."* In this labour he persevered, oppressed as he was by indisposition, till March 1799. On Friday evening, the eighth of that month, he completed his revisal of the Odyssey, and the next morning wrote part of a new preface. To watch over the disordered health of afflicted genius, and to lead a powerful, but oppressed, spirit by gentle encouragement, to exert itself in salu * Sketch of the Life of Cowper. tary 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. Hayley, in alluding to Dr. Johnson's kind and affectionate offices, at this period, bears the following honourable testimony to his merits, which we are happy in transcribing. "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." In the summer of 1798, his kinsman was induced to vary his plan of remaining for some months in the marine village of Mundsley, and thought it more eligible to make frequent visits from Dereham to the coast, passing a week at a time by the seaside. 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 And sends the patient into purer air. The frequent change of place, and the magnificence of marine scenery, produced at times a little relief to his depressed spirits. 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 his companion by the sea-side, he |