No. 922.-1 February, 1862. CONTENTS. PAGE. 1. Life and Poetry of Cowper, 2. My First Portrait, 3. Blindfold Chess, 4. French Women of Letters, 5. John Plummer, 6. An Old Man's Story, St. James' Magazine, 292 7. Death and Character of Prince Albert, London Review, 296; Saturday Review, 298; The Press, 303; Economist, 305; Independent, 306 8. Funeral of the late Prince Consort, 9. The late Dr. Turner, 10. Vesuvius at Land and Sea, 11. M. Thouvenel's Despatch-Arbitration, 12. The Romance of a Dull Life, 13. The Cyrene Marbles, POETRY.-The Wind amid the Trees, 258. Thou art the Way, 258. Land of the Living, 258. What a Child said, 258. Life's Question, 282. Mare Mediterraneum, 282. Frosty Weather, 282. SHORT ARTICLES.-The King and the Potter, 273. Poor Richard's Maxims, from Punch, 273. Negroes and Bourbons, 281. A Dish of Lava, 288. Indigo, Substitutes for, 291. Bursting of Fowling-Pieces, 291. Saving the Octoroon, 295. The Celestial Army, 310. New Uses of Prayer-Meetings, 313. The Blackbird, 315. Letter of Washington, 320. NEW BOOKS. The Tribune Almanac and Political Register for 1862. New York Tribune Association. CORRECTION.-In No. 915 we copied from, and credited to, The Philadelphia Press, a spirited poem, "The Countersign," giving the name of Frank G. Williams as the author. We are now informed that this is part of a larger poem, by Fitz James O'Brien,-published in Harper's Magazine for August. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have. and thus greatly enhance their value. THE WIND AMID THE TREES. THE skies were dark and bright, Like the eyes that I love best, From a window at the west. On their stalk lets every one, The birds to roost had gone. Not the fluttering of a feather Or the faintest chirp from these As they nestled close together, Though the wind was in the trees! Too soft to stir the flowers, That wind amid the trees!" Though your groves are thin and bare, I know that you'll remember, When you hear it murmuring there. Dear Island hearts that listen, There's a message in the breeze, And the voice of one who loves you In the wind amid the trees! -Englishwoman's Journal. "THOU ART THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIEE." By each sting of daily care, By the struggles of a heart By each band of burning pain, Severed bonds of love and youth- By the closelyknitted sod, Over those long gone to God; When the nestling head lies low; Through the "hidden path" I tread, Trust I still amid the strife, -Ladies' Companion. THE LAND OF THE LIVING. "Beautiful was the reply of a venerable man to the question whether he was still in the land of the living. No; but I am almost there.'' Not yet; though the fiat I feel has gone forth, Not yet has the summons been spoken; The frail, feeble link that connects me with earth Not yet has been shattered and broken. The kindred and friends of my earlier years Have long in the churchyard been lying; I fain would depart from this valley of tears, And pass from the land of the dying. A few of the friends of my manhood are spared; I suffer like them-yet I do not complain, That soon shall I lay down my burden of pain, I weep not for those whom on earth I loved well' WHAT A CHILD SAID. We drove the roads together, While sleigh-bells tinkled merrily And cheered the wintry weather"Where are the leaves all gone, mamma?" "Beneath the snow they're hidden;" "They'll come back pretty soon, mamma?" Yes, dearest, when they're bidden." How many times I've thought since then O'er which would droop in winter time That gentle voice would struggle up "They'll come back pretty soon, mamma," And so my grief be chidden. What wonder, since such sadd'ning thought I drop my rhymes and yonder steal From Fraser's Magazine. and be amused-as by no means indifferent to the events of the day or the opinions of COULD William Cowper, when he inscribed the world—as creating, when he did not find, his name on the title-page of Table-Talk occupation, and as vigilantly guarding, so and other Poems, have known that within ten long as his health and strength permitted, years from that time he would be the most against the approaches of that malady which popular poet of the age, and that after his blighted his earlier manhood and was desdeath he would be accounted one of the best tined to wrap in a shroud of woe his closing of letter-writers, he might have ranked the years. Unconsciously to be the painter of prophecy among such delusions as often his own life was the business of Cowper, and clouded his brain. The success of the Task he has drawn himself to the life as vividly proved to him that one-half of the prediction as Gray or Gibbon or even Walpole himself. was correct; but could he also have foreseen He portrayed himself equally in prose and in his epistolary reputation he might have reck-verse. His hymns are like Petrarch's sonnets oned it among his infelicities and recoiled" pictures in little" of his personal emofrom it with dismay. That what he wrote of tions. His Task is a poetical narrative of himself in secret chambers should be pro- his daily habits and customary meditations; claimed upon the housetops would have seemed to his sensitive spirit inconsistent alike with friendship and delicacy. Perhaps he might have recalled his letters in alarm, and foregone a principal alleviation of his solitude-correspondence with friends whom he had never seen or whom he was never more to see. Fortunately the veil was never lifted. No profane Curll, by surreptitiously publishing his letters, visited him with a new terror of death. In his matted greenhouse, by his fireside, summer and winter saw him unconsciously chronicling the simple annals of his life; and in these letters, so evidently cherished because so generally preserved, we possess one of the most interesting of autobiographies. Nor is it less fortunate that these records of a life spent in "the cool retreat - the silent shade" are so numerous and diversified. Had only his correspondence with Newton survived, though it would still be clear that the writer possessed no ordinary powers of humor, yet the general impression must have been that Cowper and Mary Unwin were a pair of moping personages whose society it were desirable to shun. Had only his letters to Hayley come down to us, we might fairly have set him down for a fine gentleman complimenting another fine gentleman with some of the ostentation but without the finished style of the Younger Pliny. But the letters addressed to Lady Hesketh and Unwin, to Mr. Bull and Mrs. King, to Rose and Norfolk Johnnie, prove Cowper to have been as nearly inclined to mirth as to melancholy-as content, if not happy, in his seclusion, and willing to amuse Of his letters are prose sketches of them, often With materials so abundant at hand, the temptation to become a biographer of Cowper has been frequently indulged; yet with one exception he has not been happy in his limners. For the most part they have selected one or two features of his character, and omitted others no less essential to a good likeness of him. He has been drawn as a suffering saint, as a latter-day hermit, as one literally complying with the apostolic precept to flee from the world, as one who purposely reformed the poetic diction of his day, as one whose proper place was Bedlam, as one who was only as mad as all serious Christians who pondered rightly on time and eternity should desire to be. In the following remarks we shall be able to show that although health and circumstances rendered seclusion from the world unavoidable, Cowper did not cease to feel interest in its movements; that if his will bent before the iron will of John Newton, he displays little or no sympathy with Newton's narrow creed; and that so far from making a hermitage of Olney or Weston, he gladly greeted every occasion of surrounding himself with the genial society of his kindred and neighbors, provided always they were not hard riders or hard drinkers; that is to say, neither the ordinary squires nor parsons of Bedfordshire in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was at one time the fashion to call Hayley an elegant biographer. To us he appears to have been most forcibly feeble. That he loved Cowper there can be no doubt, for Hayley, though a coxcomb, had a generous nature, and at least knowledge enough of his art to see that the Task was worthy a dozen Triumphs of Temper, and John Gilpin better than any or all of his own Comedies in Rhime. He rendered homage equally to Cowper's genius and character. But he was infelix opere in toto-he has drawn the portrait of a mere littérateur. The poet's religious biographers, however, have been even less successful than Hayley. Calvinism is little less adverse to poets generally than Plato himself. Of Dante's theology in verse the disciples of Newton, Scott, and Venn had never probably heard, or if it had reached their ears, rumor whispered into them that the poet was a papist born out of due season and given over to Antichrist. Of Spenser and the Fletchers as religious poets they had perhaps heard as little, for between our early literature and the saints of the eighteenth century there stood a wall of partition as impervious as that fabled wall of brass which Friar Bacon is said to have built in one night round the palace of Sigismund the emperor. Milton was doubtful prize. He had indeed sung of either Paradise, but then he was an Arian; and if his prose writings were liberally studded with texts, he for the last twenty years of his life, had never entered church or chapel. Dryden had composed some of the noblest hymns in the language, but he had also composed some of the most abominable plays. Addison had occasionally sung the songs of Sion, but the Spectator's morals savored more of Seneca and Epictetus than of Paul, of the covenant of works more than of the covenant of grace. Cowley had written an epic on the story of David, and Prior on that of Solomon, but both Addison and Prior were utter worldlings; and if Collins read latterly "no book but the best," it was notorious, lippis tonsoribus atque, that Col a About the author of the Task, Expostulation, Charity, and the Olney hymns there could be neither doubt nor demur. He had sat at the feet of Gamaliel; he had been a lay curate to Newton. He had put on record his escape from the Vanity Fair of London life, the contamination of literary associates, the profane contact of drums and routs, of Ranelagh and the playhouse. If less sublime, he was more sound in doctrine than Milton. If in no one of his devotional pieces he had reached the dignity of the "Veni Creator" of Dryden, he had not pleaded for Rome in the "Hind and Panther," he had not defiled literature with the "Spanish Friar." Here indeed was at length a sweet singer for the English Israel; here was a poet to be read, marked, and learned virginibus puerisque, by the young ladies who filled the pews of St. Mildred's in the Poultry, by the young men who called Shakspeare unclean and Plato's Republic "foolishness." In this track have nearly all Cowper's later biographers walked, until Southey came to the rescue with a narrative scarcely less excellent than his lives of Nelson and John Wesley. Mr. Robert Bell's careful and graceful sketch of the poet will suffice for many readers; but all who desire to know Cowper as he lived, thought, and wrote, the causes of his melancholy, the character of his humor, the positive and relative merits of his writings, his position in literature at the time and now, will resort to Southey's pages. He had a true sympathy with the poet; his vision was unclouded by theological mists; he had no theory to sustain or prop up; he discerns amid the accidents of disease the genuine nature of the man; he displays his weakness and his strength, and exhibits William Cowper as he appeared to Joseph Hill, to Thornton and Thurlow, to Harriet and Theodora his cousins, to his co-mates at Westminster, the Inner Temple, and the Nonsense Club, "ere melancholy marked him for her own." In it does not appear that Unwin was ever a guest at Olney, or that friendship ever attracted Cowper to Unwin's parsonage. When, however, Lady Austin or Lady Hesketh are guests to be expected at either Olney or Weston, his spirits rise, neither pains nor forethought is spared in preparation, for them the house is garnished, the garden is made trim, good accommodation is provided for servants and horses, cellar and larder are replenished, and gaudeamus" is written legibly in every letter in which their visit is mentioned. To a spirit so cleavimg to female society, the crowning infelicity of his unhappy life was perhaps that which met him at the very threshold of it-the death of his mother while he was yet an infant. 66 the following remarks we shall deal immediately with none of Cowper's biographers, but offer a brief commentary on some portions of his life and writings. It may be possible, even at the eleventh hour, to correct certain prevalent mistakes, or at least to bring out some new lines in a portrait which has long attracted, and may long continue to attract, a numerous class of readers. It is remarkable that while Cowper speaks occasionally of his mother, of whom he can have had only a vague recollection, he has only once mentioned his father, of whom he must have retained a distinct and lively impression. And this is the more remarkable, because Cowper is by no means chary in mentioning his nearest relatives on the paternal side. To the memory of a parent If we may judge, of their characters by whom he lost almost in his infancy, he ad- their portraits yet extant, Anne, wife of John dressed the most pathetic of his shorter Cowper, was a graceful, tender, and loving poems. Her kindred in the second genera- woman, endowed with some humor, with a tion he received with open arms; on her vein of melancholy, and with much sympa. picture he gazed with the rapture of a devo- thy; whereas John her husband, " Chaplain tee. But to the parent who was alive when to King George II.," has the look of a shrewd Cowper had attained to man's estate, he says and stirring personage, who could elbow his nothing beyond a simple notification of his way with the best at a levee, and who was decease in 1756. John Cowper, indeed, never sad without a reason—such as a remarried a second time; yet there is no rea- buff from his bishop, or a cold reception from son for assuming this second marriage as a lay-patron. The Cowper family had althe cause of his son's reticence, since he re-ready produced one lord chancellor, and, fers to his "mother-in-law at Berkhampstead," as sometimes troubling him with "shopping" in London, but without any charge or insinuation of novercal injustice. At Berkhampstead, of which parish Dr. Cowper was rector, the poet's school holidays and law vacations were often spent ; but neither the parish, the parsonage, nor the pastor, seems to have been classed among his pleasant recollections; whereas of the native home of his mother he never writes without interest, and sometimes with yearning emotion. We have no grounds for assuming the doctor to have been "a hard man," for though Cowper has chronicled his own sufferings at school, he says nothing of any discomforts at home. Perhaps we may find a probable solution for this and have been vexed, if not wroth, when his unequal division of filial retrospect. Through- son evinced such evident propensities for the out his life Cowper exhibits a predilection life contemplative. "The world," says Pisfor female rather than for male companions. tol," is mine oyster, which I with sword will To Unwin, indeed, he writes as to a brother; open." But Cowper's mood was less magand he deplores the early death of a "friend nanimous than "mine Ancient's." The diftorn from him "-Sir William Russell. But fidence and inconstancy of purpose which a besides an earldom, held sundry good appointments, as befitted sound Whigs. William Cowper had displayed at Westminster school fair scholastic abilities; and idle though he undoubtedly was in a solicitor's office, Mr. Newton says of him years afterward that he was by no means so ignorant of law as he represented himself to be. It is possible that his father conceived hopes that there might be a well-briefed barrister, if not a second lord chancellor in the family, may have pressed on him the virtue of rising in the world, may have cited the example of his ancestors and kinsfolk "Te pater Æneas et avunculus excitet Hec tor |