His Later Life. It was only in the latter part of his career that the poet made the acquaintance of William Hayley, his future biographer, who had been drawn toward Cowper by the charms of his verse and who came to visit him: this friend, through his wide familiarity with the outer world, had suborned bishops and clergy and public men to write to this melancholy exile of Olney and cheer him with their praises—all which praises fell like hail upon Cowper's window pane. And there had been a little trip devised, to divert that weakened and fatigued mind, down to Eartham in Sussex, where his friend Hayley has a beautiful place, and where he brings the artist Romney, to paint the wellknown portrait; but there is no long stay away from the old covert on the flats of Buckinghamshire ; indeed this covert had taken new life within a few years by the advent of a cousin, the Lady Hes * * William Hayley, b. 1745; d. 1820. Life of Cowper, 1803. keth, the widowed sister of his old lost Theodora ; she had come with her carriage and trappings, and taken a fine house, and sought to revive pleasantly all the mundane influences of Lady Austen. From Olney there had come about in those times -at the wise suggestion of Lady Hesketh-a move over to the near village of Weston, which thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years ago-moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet-I strolled down from Newport Pagnell to which place I had taken coach from Northampton- following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak " inn, I found next door his old home - its front overgrown with roses and strolled into his old garden; and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white tasselled night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.] It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was-if not undertaken-most largely wrought upon. The regular occupation involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not "gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far from the "hollow" ships. In the intervals of this important labor-which was only fairly successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as Crabbe gained at a later day-only chance things were written. But some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful issues. That relating to his mother's picture—sent to him by some cousinly hand—a flashing from the embers of his life, as it were, the reader must know; who knows it too well? "Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed The same that oft in childhood solaced me. Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!" But it is a poem from which quotation will no way serve. After the death of Warton, poet Laureate (1790), Lady Hesketh, and other friends were anxious that the Olney poet should succeed to that honor; Southey says, he might have secured it; but Cowper can never, never go up to court for a kissing of the king's hand. And now there are coming fast drearier days and months to these good people of the Weston home. The poet's mind, staggered perhaps by those later Homeric labors, but more likely by the grievous religious doubts which overhang him, loses from time to time its poise; and he goes maundering, or silent, and with no smile for days, into the deserts of melancholy. Mrs. Unwin, worn down by long fatigues, is at last smitten by paralysis; and she whose life has been spent in serving must herself be served; the poor poet bringing to that service all the instincts of affection, and the wavering purpose of a shattered mind. Yet out of this new gloom and these terrors of the home comes that faultless little poem inscribed to "My Mary. "Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, My Mary. "For could I view-nor them-nor thee What sight worth seeing could I see? The sun would rise in vain for me, My Mary. "Partakers of thy sad decline Thy hands their little force resign, Yet gently prest, press gently mine, My Mary." But here, as before, quotation counts for nothing; it cannot bring to mind the mellowness and the tenderness which lurk in so many of the lines and in all the flowing measure of the little poem. Mrs. Unwin has embalmment in it that will keep her memory alive, longer than would any tomb in Westminster. Well, Mrs. Unwin dies at last in the town of East Dereham, Norfolk, where they had taken her for "diversion"; and the poor poet died there three years later and was buried beside her. |