Selections from the poetical works of William Cowper

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Introduction xi

Bibliography lxiii

Introduction

COWPER AND HIS PLACE IN ENGLISH POETRY.

Taine in his notice of Cowper 1 has said of the poet that his poems "were but the echo of his life." The remark is true, and true, as well, of many other poets. This, however, is not because Cowper's life was one of striking changes, stirring experiences, strong passions, or strenuous toils. Much of it was monotonous. The greater part of it was passed in seclusion. His horizon was bounded by the sky line of a somewhat obscure English village. It is, in fact, the inner rather than the outer life of the poet which finds its "echo " in the poems. But there can be no mistake as to the fact and the degree of reflection of this inner life in his poetical work. The Cowper of The Task is the Cowper of the Letters, lineament for lineament, tone for tone ; and if this gives so much of flavor and coloring to his poetry, if it makes up so much of its charm and power, on the other hand it entails limitations. Olney and Weston could at best afford only a narrow circle of interests, and in these the poet's life was centered. " But, oh ! wherever else I am accounted dull, dear Mr. Griffith, let me pass for a genius at Olney." So wrote Cowper in anticipation of a criticism on his poems. Whether we view his life and surroundings as friendly or adverse to the development of his poetic genius, we should know something of his history in order to have a true appreciation of that genius. The sorrowful experiences

1 English Literature, Am. ed., vol. ii, p. 243.

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which preluded his lasting retirement from the London world, his habits of life at Olney and Weston, his friendships, and, above all, his insanity, that dreadful malady clouding so many years and never wholly lifted, — all this should be known in outline at least, if the true measure of his poetry is to be taken.

I. BIRTH AND EDUCATION.

William Cowper was born at Great Berkhampstead, Nov. 26, 1 73 1. He counted among his paternal ancestors, Sir William Cowper, a staunch Royalist, who died in 1664, a second Sir William Cowper, grandson of the former, and an Earl Cowper, his son. The. poet's father was the Reverend John Cowper, a chaplain of George II and the rector of Great Berkhampstead. The maiden name of Cowper's mother was Anne Donne. It is said that she could trace her descent from Henry III, and that she numbered among her ancestors Dr. John Donne, the poet. Cowper alludes to his gentle birth in the close of his poem on The Receipt of My Mother's Picture, —

My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth.

It may have been, also, some recollection of this ancestry which led his friend Newton to speak of the poet so often as Sir Cowper. Of the five children born to these parents in the Berkhampstead rectory, only two survived infancy, William and John. The mother herself died in 1737, when William was but six years old.

Of his earlier years we know very little. His birthplace was a quiet village of some note in English history, first as a royal seat under the Mercian kings and once again under the Plantagenets. It was situated in a region of picturesque scenery, which Cowper, as a boy, knew well, for he says in

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speaking of his early home : " There was neither tree, nor gate, nor stile in all that country, to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace." Cowper's school days began at a very early age. In the Lines on the Receipt of My Mother's Picture, he recalls them among other incidents of childhood, —

And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way.

Shortly after her death, in 1737, he was sent from home to the school of a Dr. Pitman at Market Street, a village some seven miles distant from Berkhampstead. Here the storms of his life began. He was made the victim of a school bully, more than twice his age, and for two years endured from him "acts of barbarity" which Cowper would not name, whose tf savage treatment of me impressed such a dread of his figure upon my mind that I even remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him, higher than his knees ; and I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress." Cowper in the account of his early life adds : " May the Lord pardon him, and may we meet in glory." But this forgiving disposition did not restrain the poet from writing his Tirocinium. At Market Street, too, began the attacks of melancholia, caused in part, at least, by such brutalities inflicted on a shrinking and sensitive boy, attacks which were later to assume forms so terrible and become a mental disease so seated. He was removed from the school, but the mischief had been wrought. Southey in his life of Cowper says that when he " was removed from Dr. Pitman's, he was in some danger of losing his sight, specks having appeared on both eyes, which, it was feared, might cover them." To gain relief from his threatened blindness, he spent two years, 1739-41, under the care and in the house of an oculist, Mr. Disney. Cowper was so far relieved from ophthalmic trouble, xiv INTR OD UC TION.

whatever it may have been, that he was placed again at school, — this time at Westminster. He was now ten years old. Eight years of residence at Westminster gave him what education he had, for Cowper was not university bred. They were happy years, the happiest of his life, as Southey suggests with truth. It is not probable that the Tirocinium was at all colored by his Westminster experiences. Rather the reverse, as Cowper in the poem, alluding to the sports at school, says, —

The pleasing spectacle at once excites Such recollection of our own delights, That, viewing it, we seem almost to obtain Our innocent, sweet, simple years again.

And writing to Unwin in 1786, he thus recalls his sixth form days : " I fancied myself once more a schoolboy, — a period of life in which, if I had never tasted true happiness, I was at least equally unacquainted with its contrary." It does not appear that Cowper was at all wanting in healthy boy nature. He was fond of outdoor sports ; delighted in football and cricket. Nor was he a dull and mooning scholar. He acquired a good knowledge of the classics, gave some attention to logic, and before he left Westminster had tried his hand at English verse, the "first heir of his invention" being an imitation of John Phillips' Splendid Shilling, Verses on Finding a Heel of a Shoe. They are remarkable only for the closing lines, which seem to be a foreboding of

his own fate, —

From his airy height Headlong he fell and through the rest of life Drags the dull load of disappointment on.

Throughout Cowper's life the influences of his school days at Westminster are clearly traceable. The usher of his form was Vincent Bourne, noted as a Latinist and also for his Latin poems. For him Cowper cherished an equal admira-

INTRODUCTION. xv

tion and affection. Years after they had parted Cowper wrote to Unwin, May 23, 1781: "I love the memory of Vincent Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him." There were also school associates between whom and Cowper ties of intimacy were formed, ties never wholly forgotten by the poet. Among these schoolfellows were Robert Lloyd, Charles Churchill, George Colman, and Warren Hastings. For Churchill as a poet, Cowper always exhibited an excessive admiration. In 1792, when Warren Hastings was the object of general obloquy, Cowper came to his defense in the following lines :

Hastings ! I knew thee young and of a mind While young, humane, conversable and kind, Nor can I well believe thee, gentle then Now grown a villain and the worst of men ; But rather some suspect, who have oppressed And worried thee, as not themselves the best.

It was at Westminster, too, that he first met his cousin Harriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, to whom in his later life he owed so much sympathetic devotion and care, and to whom some of his most charming letters are addressed. In the Memoir of his early life, Cowper gives little account of his Westminster career, and even that pertains mostly to his religious state. He sums it all up in the following words : " At the age of eighteen, being tolerably furnished with grammatical knowledge, but as ignorant in all points of religion as the satchel at my back, I was taken from Westminster."

For some reason, a university career was not thought of for Cowper. During his residence at Westminster he had been entered at the Middle Temple, and on leaving school, after spending some nine months in his home at Berkhampxvi INTR OD UC TION.

stead, he was articled for three years to a Mr. Chapman, an attorney of Ely Place, Holborn. Writing to Mr. King, March 3, 1788, he says of this step : " I was bred to the law ; a profession to which I was never much inclined and in which I engaged, rather because I was desirous to gratify a most indulgent father, than because I had any hope in it myself." In Mr. Chapman's office he remained for three years ; " three years misspent in an attorney's office," he calls them in his Memoir, and further describes them in a letter to Lady Hesketh : " I did actually live with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor, that is to say, I slept three years in his house, but I lived, that is to say, I spent my days, in Southampton Row, as you very well remember. There was I and the future Lord Chancellor, 1 constantly employed from morning to night, in giggling and making giggle instead of studying the law." The attraction at Southampton Row was the society of his cousins Harriet and Theodora, daughters of Sir Ashley Cowper. The consequences for Cowper were twofold : he got no knowledge of the law and he formed an attachment for his cousin Theodora.

II. THE TEMPLE RESIDENCE.

In 1752, having become of age, and having finished his time in the office of Mr. Chapman, he took chambers in the Middle Temple. Whether owing to the greater solitariness of his life or other causes unknown, he seems almost at once to have passed under the shadow of that melancholy which darkened his whole life, and which he had not wholly escaped in his Westminster days. Now it assumed a more virulent type. " I was struck," he says in the Memoir, " not long after my settlement in the Temple, with such a dejection of spirits, as none but they who have felt the same can have

1 Thurlow.

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the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack lying down in horror, and rising up in despair. ... In this state of mind I continued near a twelvemonth." A timely change of scene at Southampton averted the threatening evil and restored him to comparative cheerfulness. Soon after his return to London, he was called to the bar, June 14, 1754. Meantime the affairs of love were engrossing him. The affection of Cowper for his cousin Theodora was fully returned by her. Cowper sought her hand in marriage ; but her father, Sir Ashley, set his face resolutely against the union. And so the two lives were parted. Theodora Cowper never loved again. She was faithful throughout her life to the memory of this affection and tenderly mindful of Cowper himself in the later years of his sore affliction. She sealed up the poems addressed to her as Delia, directing that the packet should be opened only after her death. This occurred in 1824. Cowper never refers to her in any of his letters. His poetry never touches on the sentiment of love. This silence has a meaning. The affection with its issue of disappointment was too sacred with him for common speech. Cowper moved from the Middle to the Inner Temple in 1759. His worldly affairs were far from prosperous. The death of his father in 1756 left him with a small patrimony. As Commissioner of Bankruptcy, an office held by him in the irony of fate, he received sixty pounds annually. Beyond these sources he seems to have had no income. He awaited clients who never came, and the question of livelihood began to be pressing. This Temple residence, barren as it was of all legal occupations, had for Cowper important literary associations. He became a member of the Nonsense Club, composed of seven Winchester men. Its members, besides Cowper, were Bonnell Thornton, Colman, Lloyd, Joseph Hill, his lifelong friend and correspondent, Bensley, and De Grey. The club dined together every Thursday. Its xvm INTR OB UC TION.

meetings were largely given up to literary fun. That Cowper contributed his share is easy to infer when we remember what his " whisking wit" in later days could do in such jeusc if esprit as the Repoi't of an Adjudged Case and the ballad of John Gilpin. Here was originated by Thornton the " Exhibition by the Society of Sign Painters," to which Hogarth lent his aid. Hence also seems to have come Thornton's Mock Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, 5? adapted to the ancient British music of the salt-box, jew's-harp, marrow bones and cleavers and hum-drum or hurdy-gurdy." Out of Cowper's connection with the Nonsense Club grew his essays, contributed to the Connoisseur, a weekly periodical, one of the numerous progeny of the latter and Spectator, conducted by Colman and Thornton. These essays bore the following titles :

No. in. Letter containing the character of the delicate Billy Suckling.

No. 115. Letter from Christopher Ironside, an old Bachelor, complaining of the indignities received by him from the ladies.

No. 119. Of keeping a secret. — Characters of faithless confidantes.

No. 134. Letter from Mr. Village, giving an account of the present state of Country Churches, their Clergy and their Congregations.

No. 138. On conversation. The chief pests of Society pointed out. Those who converse irrationally considered as imitating the language of different animals.

He wrote also for the St. fames Chronicle several papers and the humorous ode printed among his early poems, entitled An Ode, Secundum Ai'tem, having for its first line

Shall I begin with ah ! or oh !

INTRODUCTION. xix

In a letter to Newton, Dec. 4, 1781, after alluding to Prior's political songs and his desire to imitate the example of Prior, Rowe, and Congreve in this vein, he added: "While I lived in the Temple, I produced several half-penny ballads, two or three of which had the honour to be popular." These cannot be traced. We could better have spared some heavy Parliamentary speeches which have survived oblivion in spite of their deserts.

If this Temple residence knew few, if any, legal studies on Cowper's part, he supplied their place by studies in the classics, ancient and modern. Homer was read and line by line compared with Pope's translation. Two books of Voltaire's Henriade were also done into English by him. But putting together all Cowper's literary work during the twelve Temple years, 1752-63, it is a sorry account. Cowper had reached the age of thirty-two. He was on the verge of that mental catastrophe which in one view wrecked and in another seems to have made his life. But he had well-nigh wasted these twelve years in literary and social dawdling. His life up to this point had no serious purpose and gave little promise of any high future success. Yet his Temple residence stands connected with his future literary career in two respects: his vein of wit had been opened and his Homeric studies were to be used in the translation of Homer, to which in distant days he gave so much of laborious, if unsuccessful effort.

The year 1763 is the annus terribilis in Cowper's life. It begins that long despair which stretched through six and thirty years up to his death of gloom. It changed the whole tenor and surroundings of his career. The crisis it brought on is all the more striking, as the very events which caused it seemed to open a more prosperous future. Cowper's means of living had become somewhat straitened. It was necessary to increase his income. Through the influence of

XX INTRODUCTION.

a kinsman, Major Cowper, he was offered the position of Reading Clerk and Clerk of Committees in the House of Lords. These offices were easily discharged and they were lucrative. But they involved also considerable publicity. On this Cowper began to brood, and finally shrank from it so morbidly that he begged in their place the less lucrative but more private position of Clerkship of the Journals. It turned out that, in order to secure the appointment, the candidate must pass an examination at the bar of the House. Cowper's own words best describe the mental state into which he was thrown by this announcement. " To require my attendance at the bar of the House, that I might there publicly entitle myself to the office, was in effect to exclude me from it. In the meantime, the interest of my friend, the honour of his choice, my own reputation and circumstances, all urged me forward, all pressed me to undertake that which I saw to be impracticable. They, whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition of themselves on any occasion is mortal poison, may have some idea of the situation. Others can have none." Cowper, spurred by such considerations, made an earnest effort to pass the dreaded ordeal, tried for six months to prepare himself for the examination. He wrote Lady Hesketh, Aug. 9, 1763 : " I have a pleasure in writing to you at any time, but especially at the present, when my days are spent in reading the Journals and my nights in dreaming of them, an employment not very agreeable to a head, that has long been habituated to the luxury of choosing its subject, and has been as little employed upon business as if it had grown upon the shoulders of a much wealthier gentleman." After a vacation of two months at Margate, he returned to London, awaiting the coming examination, " preparing for the push," as he expressed it. The nearer came the day, the greater grew his morbid horror of it. In his Memoir he says : " I looked

INTR 0L> UC TION. xxi

forward to the approaching winter and regretted the flight of every moment which brought it nearer. ... In this situation such a fit of passion sometimes seized me, that I have cried out aloud and cursed the hour of my birth. . . . I now began to look upon madness as the only chance remaining. I had a strong foreboding that so it would fare with me, and I wished for it earnestly, and looked forward to it with impatient expectation. My chief fear was that my senses would not fail me time enough to excuse my appearance at the bar of the House of Lords, which was the only purpose I wanted it to answer." Soon thoughts of suicide forced themselves upon him. He recalled that incident in his early life when his father put into his hand a treatise vindicating the right of self-destruction and asked his opinion on it. His father's silence on hearing his adverse views was now interpreted as disagreement with them. He chanced to overhear two strangers pleading in favor of the right to end one's life. His mind was made up to the deed. Then follow in succession the abortive attempts, the laudanum, the drive to Tower Wharf, that he might drown himself in the Thames from the Custom House Quay, the attempt with his penknife to pierce his heart, and lastly hanging himself with his garter from the top of his chamber door. The last was almost successful. The breaking of the garter saved his life.

Cowper's mental condition immediately consequent upon these suicidal attempts was one of distressing melancholy. It lasted for months. It is fully described in the Memoir, and there does not exist in literature a picture of more acute, unbroken religious suffering. His mania took the form of remorse. " A sense of God's wrath and a deep despair of escaping it instantly succeeded. ... As I walked to and fro in my chamber I said within myself, * There never was so abandoned a wretch, so great a sinner.' All my xxn INTR OD UC TION.

worldly sorrows seemed as though they had never been, the terrors which succeeded them seemed so great and so much more afflicting." He experienced also physical sensations which oppressed him. "A frequent flashing like that of fire before my eyes, and an excessive pressure upon the brain, made me apprehensive of an apoplexy. . . . While I traversed the apartment, expecting every moment that the earth would open her mouth and swallow me, my conscience scaring me, and the city of refuge out of reach and out of sight, a strange and terrible darkness fell upon me. If it were possible that a heavy blow could light on the brain, without touching the skull, such was the sensation I felt. I clapped my hand to my forehead, and cried aloud, through the pain it gave me. ... I never went into the street, but I thought the people stared and laughed at me. . . . I bought a ballad of one who was singing it in the street, because I thought it was written on me."

All this mental and physical suffering finally culminated in a dream, which seems to have overshadowed all his remaining days. ft One morning as I lay between sleeping and waking, I seemed to myself to be walking in Westminster Abbey, waiting till prayers should begin. Presently, I thought I heard the minister's voice and hastened towards the choir ; just as I was upon the point of entering, the iron gate under the organ was flung in my face with a jar that made the Abbey ring ; the noise awoke me and a sentence of excommunication from all the churches upon the earth could not have been so dreadful to me as the interpretation which I could not avoid putting upon this dream." The interpretation was that his soul was finally and forever lost.

After remaining in this condition from December, 1763, to the following July, Cowper was taken by his friends to Dr. Cotton's, at St. Albans, where he was put under medical care. It seems unaccountable that they should not from the first

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have seen that what he needed was the physician and not the divine. At Dr. Cotton's he remained till June 17, 1765. Then he recovered from the acute distress of mind into which he had been plunged.

III. COWPER AT HUNTINGDON AND OLNEY.

It became necessary for Cowper's friends to provide for him some quiet home in the country. London was out of the question. Huntingdon, a small village near the Fens, upon the river Ouse, was chosen, mainly, it would seem, because Cowper would thus be in easy reach of his brother John, then in residence at Benet (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. The choice pleased Cowper. He sought and enjoyed the society it afforded. He began to resume his correspondence with his friends. But what invests his Huntingdon residence with most importance to himself and interest to us is that here began his acquaintance with the Unwin family, which eventuated in his becoming an inmate of their house. He speedily became intimate with the son, the Reverend William Cathorne Unwin, to which intimacy we owe many of Cowper's choicest letters. Here began the horticulture which for so many years gave him recreation and exercise, and to which he makes frequent allusion in his letters, and which furnishes a theme for the third book of The Task, — The Garden. Here, too, began that simple, quiet, uneventful, recluse-like life which is best described by Cowper in a letter to the wife of Major Cowper, Oct. 20, 1766, and which in the main would describe his life to the end : " We breakfast commonly between eight and nine ; till eleven, we read either the scriptures, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries ; at eleven, we attend divine service which is performed here twice every day ; and from twelve to three W£ separate and amuse ourselves as we please.

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

During that interval I either read in my own apartment, or work in the garden. We seldom sit an hour after dinner, but if the weather permits adjourn to the garden, wherewith Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea time. If it rains, or is too windy for walking, we either converse within doors, or sing some hymns of Martin's collection, and by the help of Mrs. Unwin's harpsichord make up a tolerable concert. . . . After tea, we sally forth to walk in good earnest. Mrs. Unwin is a good walker and we have generally travelled about four miles before we are home again. ... At night we read and converse as before till supper and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon ; and last of all the family are called to prayers." It could not be that such a religious regimen was a good thing for Cowper. It was neither good for his soul nor good for his mind. But from the time he turned his attention to religious life he was drawn toward an excessive asceticism. Lady Hesketh strove in vain to check this tendency. Evil results came of it at last.

The Huntingdon residence lasted till the death of the elder Unwin broke up the home. The Reverend John Newton, making a call of condolence upon Mrs. Unwin, was consulted on the question of some suitable residence, and recommended Olney, where he happened to be rector of the parish church. His suggestion was acted on, and Mrs. Unwin removed to Olney, Cowper remaining an inmate of her household.

Olney is the largest of a cluster of villages. Emberton lies on the south, Weston Underwood on the west, while on the east and north are Clifton and Lavendon. The river Ouse winds its way through surrounding meadows. One long and broad street ran southward, widening into a triangular market place, on the south side of which stood a

INTRODUCTION. xxv

large brick house, so long the home of Cowper. The garden was separated from that of Newton's vicarage by a small orchard, through which a right of way was purchased and a doorway made through the vicarage garden wall. This garden contained the "greenhouse" and also "the nutshell of a summerhouse," both favorite retreats of the poet, often alluded to in his correspondence, 1 the latter as the place where he did much of his literary work. From October, 1767, to November, 1786, Cowper continued to reside at Olney. During the earlier portion of this period his life is marked by his intimacy with the Reverend John Newton and a consequent religious activity. He was Newton's constant companion in his pastoral visits. He essayed similar visits himself to the cottagers. He aided in carrying on the prayer meetings. All literary occupation seems to have been dropped. His correspondence shows that he was absorbed in religious matters. He corresponded with Lady Hesketh no longer, and wrote with less frequency and ease to Hill. The removal of William Unwin to Stock further deprived him of an intercourse which was always in Cowper's life a source of cheer. In March, 1770, his brother John died, after a short illness, during which Cowper was his constant attendant. In this last illness John Cowper embraced the poet's views of Christian life, after some long and anxious days on the part of Cowper, in which he was " wrestling for a blessing " upon the dying man. Cowper wrote a full account of his brother's illness and death and of his own religious struggle experienced while attending him. Wright 2 well terms it a "curious psychological study of the religious mind."

It seems clear that a course of religious life, such as that entered on and fostered under Mr. Newton's active influence,

1 letter to Newton, June 22, 1786.

2 Life of William Cowper.

xxvi INTR OD UC TION.

was hazardous in the extreme. Cowper's friends seem from the beginning to have blundered fatally in their management of his case. We are not surprised to hear that in 1 77 1 he began to show some symptoms of derangement. It was clear that another attack of insanity, attended by the same symptoms, was impending. To avert this attack, by giving Cowper some mental occupation, Newton suggested that they should jointly make a collection of hymns, to be known as the Olney Hymns. " It w T as likewise intended," as Newton said, " to perpetuate the remembrance of an intimate and endeared friendship." During the years 1771 and 1772 Cowper wrote a number of the Olney Hymns. They all strike one note, — plaintive, if not despondent. What was intended as a diversion probably only served to quicken the seeds of derangement lying dormant since his apparent recovery at Dr. Cotton's. The year 1772 passed, however, and there was no open outbreak of the disease. In this year he was engaged to be married to Mrs. Unwin. But in the year following, 1773, there came upon him an attack of insanity, in some respects even more dreadful than that which ten years before had blasted his life.