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dropped into an imbecility of weakness he fell into a moody 
stupor.” He survived his cherished friend more than three 
years, and they were years of darkness and desolation. With 
one striking exception—‘ The Castaway,”—his writing closed 
with the attack of illness which took away Mrs. Unwin. Of 
course there were those who questioned the propriety of such 
friendships as those of the poet with the vivacious Lady Austen, 
the clever Lady Hesketh, or even with the venerable Mrs. Unwin. 
Mrs. Grundy was not able to prove the existence of any wrong, 
but at least she could shake her head and gather up her skirts as 
a typical British matron should. The charges against the poet— 
never openly made, but consisting of hint and innuendo—-had not 
an atom of foundation on which to rest. Literature has to thank 
the three ladies named for having called into active use the 
latent powers of the poet’s mind, and for having nursed him so 
tenderly through his long periods of sorrow and despair. The 
gentleness and purity of Cowper’s life, as well as of his muse, 
will enhance his fame. Happily for this country—for its 
literature and its people—we have not yet laid it down as an 
axiom that immorality is a necessary condition for immortality. 
Four times did reason totter on her throne—for eighteen 
months in 1768-4, for nearly four years prior to 1776, for six 
months in 1787, and, with one or two brief intervals, from 1794 
to the spring of 1800, when came the soft night, weeping all 
nameless agonies with its mild dews, and wrapping all griefs in 
its darkness and stillness. The poet’s madness was not the 
result of religious excitement, it had its origin entirely in 
physical causes. ‘‘He learned in suffering what he taught in 
song.” Let it not be supposed that in perusing Cowper’s works 
the reader will meet with painful evidence of his mental 
aberration. He kept his misery out of all his poems—save from 
two. One of these, written while under the influence of delirium 
during his first attack, was the outcome of intense agony. The 
other—‘' The Castaway ”—written the year before his death, was 
the moan of a broken heart—“ of one of friends, of hope, of all 
bereft. . . . Novoice divine the storm allayed, no light 
propitious shone,” A few months later the wheels of weary life 
at last stood still, and the tired spirit was at rest. 
Lowell’s lines, telling how ‘long generations come and go, at 
last she bears a singer,” sound like an echo of Cowper’s lines in 
“Table Talk’ :— 
“ Ages elapsed ere Homer’s lamp appeared, 
And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard ; 
To carry nature lengths unknown before, 
To give a Milton birth, asked ages more.” 
In this review, Cowper passes over unnoticed ‘‘ him who left 
half told the story of Cambuscan bold ;” he has not a word to 
say of the gentle Spenser or of the myriad-minded Shakespeare. 
