How should a man grow opulent or purchase the soil he tills, who says: 'I might write you on farming, on building, on marketing; but my poor distracted mind is so jaded, so racked, and bedeviled with the task of the superlatively damned obligation to make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon at the very word business.' His great defect was the lack of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the want of that self command and self suppression by which great souls, conceiving a mission, are able to fullfill it, despite the impulses of earth, alike in sunshine and in wintry gloom. To the last, he had a divided aim in his activity,-conviviality and the muse. Thus it is, that, while his hoofs were of fire, he continued to wade the mud. To this, more than to his outward situation, is due that he never rose permanently above his enviromnent into the serene ether of moral and physical victory, but passed existence in an angry discontent with fate. We can believe that to his culture as a poet a season of poverty and suffering was a positive advantage--a divine mean to a divine end. It was required only that his heart should be right, that he should constitute one object the soul of his endeavors; then, as it was his lot to strive, it would have been his glory to conquer. Said Jean Paul, who had often only an allowance of water, 'I would not for much that I have been born richer.' 'The canary bird sings sweeter, the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.' 'Fortune,' says Disraeli, 'has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.' Tasso was obliged to borrow a crown to subsist through the week. Cervantes, the genius of Spain, wanted bread. Said a nobleman to a bishop: 'I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make get him forward in the world?'-'I know of but one way,' replied the bishop; give him parts and poverty.' Poussin, shown a picture by a person of rank, remarked. 'You only want a little poverty, sir, to make you a good painter.' Johnson usually wrote from the pressure of want. With his lassitude and love of ease, he would never have been the literary autocrat of his century, had he not been pressed into service and driven on to glory at the sharp point of necessity. Influence. On the popular mind of Scotland his influence has been great and lasting. His poetry has helped to awaken, enlarge, elevate, and refine it. This frank, generous, and reckless blooming of poetic life was needed as a counteraction against the pitiless doctrines of Calvinism. To the national literature it restored the idea of beauty; to the national religion, the pleasures of instinct; to both, the natural expression of the heart's emotions. While 'rivers roll and woods are green,' aspiring youth will be instructed by the efforts, the miseries, the revolts, the errors, and the virtues of the mighty peasant who 'grew immortal as he stooped behind his plough.' COWPER. Poor charming soul, perishing like a frail flower transplanted from a warm land to the snow: the world's temperature was too rough for it; and the moral law, which should have supported it, tore it with its thorns.-Taine. Biography.-Born in the county of Hertford 1731, son of a clergyman. In his seventh year, he lost his mother, a lady of most amiable temper and agreeable manner At this tender age he was sent to a boarding-school. Timid and home-sick, he was singled out by a boy of fifteen who persecuted him with relentless cruelty, and never seemed pleased except when tormenting him: 'I conceived such dread of his figure, that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress.' At nine a malady of the nerves seized him, the shadow of evil to come. At ten he was sent to Westminster, where he studied the classics diligently till eighteen. Here he experienced more brutality, and in consequence could never advert to those years without a feeling of horror. Warren Hastings was one of his schoolmates. He next studied, or professed to study, the law with a London attorney, and was admitted to the bar in 1754. A more unsuitable choice of profession it would have been difficult to make. He devoted his time chiefly to poetry and general literature. As students, he and Thurlow the future Lord Chancellor-were 'constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle.' His evil had not lest him. Melancholy came, profound dejection: 'Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair.' At thirty-one, almost without an object in life, his father dead and his fortune small, he accepted gladly, without reflection, the post of Reading Clerk in the House of Lords. But his meek and gentle spirit was so overwhelmed by the idea of a public appearance, that he resigned his position before he assumed its duties. Thinking, like a man in a fever, that a change of posture would relieve his pain, he had first requested appointment to the Clerkship of the Journals-an office which, it was thought, would not require his presence in the House. But he had to undergo an examination, and again his nerves were unstrung: '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 horror of my situation others can have none. My continual misery at length brought on a nervous fever; quiet forsook me by day, and peace by night; even a finger raised against me seemed more than I could bear.' For six months he studied the Journal books and tried to prepare himself, but he read without understanding: 'In this situation, such a fit of passion has sometimes seized me when alone in my chambers, that I have cried out aloud, and cursed the hour of my birth; lifting up my eyes to heaven not as a suppliant, but in the hellish spirit of rancorous reproach and blasphemy against my Maker.' The day of examination arrived, and attempted of suicide as a means of escape. At last insanity came, and he was sent to an asylum, whilst his conscience was scaring him, and the bottomless pit yawned to receive him. On his recovery, feeling himself incapable of an active life, he withdrew into the country, with the remnant of his patrimony and a further sum contributed by his friends. Here he formed an intimacy with the family of Mr. Unwin, a resident clergyman: 'They are the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as free from the ceremonious civilty of country gentlefolks as any I ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a stranger, and their house is always open to me.' To his joy they received him as an inmate. Their cheerful company, the wholesome air, and, above all, the maternal tenderness of Mrs. Unwin gave him a few gleams of light. Several hours of each day he worked in the garden; the rest of the time he employed in reading Scripture or sermons, in singing hymns with his friends, and in Christian conversation. On the death of Mr Urwin, he removed with the family to Olney, where he enjoyed the friendship of Rev. Mr. Newton, a man of great force of character and of fervid piety. Here, amid picturesque scenery, he lived a religious recluse. As a pastime to divert him from sad reflections, Mr. Newton engaged his assistance in preparing a volume of hymns; but his morbid melancholy increased, and in 1778 he was again shrouded in the gloom of madness. Mrs. Unwin watched over him with untiring vigilance. After four years, reason returned. As he began to recover, he took to gardening and composing poetry. A friend gave him three hares, which yet live in his verse. He had also five rabbits, two guinea-pigs, two dogs, a magpie, a jay, a starling, canaries, pigeons, and goldfinches. Upwards of fifty, he published his first volume of poems. On the occasion, he wrote to Mr. Unwin : 'Your mother says I must write, and "must" admits of no apology; I might otherwise plead that I have nothing to say, that I am weary, that I am dull. But all these pleas, and whatever pleas besides, either disinclination, indolence, or necessity, might suggest, are overruled, as they ought to be, the moment a lady adduces her irrefragable argument, you must.' At this time, Lady Austen, a baronet's widow, sister-in-law of a clergyman near Olney, became his friend. Elegant, accomplished, and witty, her society was an antidote to his low spirits. Whenever the cloud seemed to be coming over him, her sprightlinss dispelled it. She was the task-master of his muse, assigned him topics, and exhorted him to undertake the translation of Homer, Mrs. Unwin, the devoted friend of twenty years, looked with no little jealousy upon the ascendency of this fair inspirer; and finding it necessary to choose which he shonld please to retain, Cowper, in mental anguish, sent Lady Austen a valedictory letter. Depression continued: 'My heart resembles not the heart of a christian, mourning and yet rejoicing, pierced with thorns, yet wreathed about with roses; I have the thorn without the rose. My brier is a wintry one, the flowers are withered, but the thorn remains.' His cousin, a woman of refined and fascinating manners, whom he had not seen for three-and-twenty years, came to visit them; and, with her, sweet moments. Thus he records the promised delight: 'I shall see you again, I shall hear your voice. We shall take walks together. I will show you my prospects- the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse, and its banks, everything that I have described. I will not let you come till the end of May or the beginning of June, because before that time my green-house will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with nets, and spread the floor with mats, and there you shall sit, with a bed of mignonette at your side, and a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day.' Despair was seldom out of his mind. endless conjectures, apprehending the worst. He floated on a sea of In 1788, he wrote: 'O trouble! the portion of mortals-but mine in particular. Would I had never known thee, or could bid thee farewell forever! for, I meet thee at every turn, my pillows are stuffed with thee, my very roses smell of thee.' In 1792 Mrs. Unwin was stricken with paralysis, and the task of nursing her fell upon the sensitive and dejected poet. Again he battled with despondency, planned work upon Milton in his occasionally bright intervals, relapsed again into a painful illness of mind, from which, after the death of Mrs. Unwin, he found relief only in the revision of Homer. 'I may as well do this,' he said, 'for I can do nothing else;' and toiled sadly on till he died, in 1800, under the terrors of eternal damnation. On his death-bed, when told to confide in the Redeemer, who desired to save all men, he uttered a passionate cry, begging the clergyman not to offer him such consolations. Writings.-Truth, one of his earlier poems-all of which, perhaps, have been less read than they deserved. The parallel between Voltaire and the poor cottager is an exquisite piece of eloquence and poetry : Yon cottager, who weaves at our own door, O happy peasant; O happy bard! His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward; On one occasion, to arouse him from unusual depression, Lady Austen told him, in her happiest manner, an amusing story of a famous horseman; and it kept him laughing during the greater part of the night. The next morning he turned it into the best of playful ballads—John Gilpin. It rapidly found its way into all the periodicals of the day, was read to crowded houses in London, and was repeated with equal success on provincial stages. Perhaps it has given as much pleasure to as many people, young and old, educated and uneducated, as anything of the same length that ever was written. It is worthy of remark that this merry ballad was written by a man who seemed to himself suspended over an abyss-the flame and darkness of hell, and, while it was convulsing audiences with laughter, he was in the depths of despair. A cousin sent him his mother's portrait. He received it in trepidation, kissed it, hung it where it would be seen last at night, first in the morning, and wrote a poem on it, whose tenderness and pathos, flowing in richer and sweeter music than he has elsewhere reached, are unequaled by anything else he has written, and unsurpassed by little in the language. Springing from the deepest and purest fount of passion, and shaping itself into mobile and fluent verse, it reveals his true originality, as well as that life-like elegance, that natural spirit of art, wherein consists the great revolution of the modern style : O that those lips had language! Life has pass'd |