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154

CONVERSION

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mind, while rational, was in that state of skepticism, his madness was infinitely worse than Cowper's. We know not what to make of the tone, half devout, half sneering, that marks a portion of the life of the Christian poet. But Southey had also called the experience of Bunyan himself, in one stage of it, a burning and feverish enthusiasm. He seems to have prided himself in the assumption of a much better understanding of Cowper's malady, than Newton and Mrs. Unwin, Cowper's dearest friends and guardians, possessed; but of its cure, as divine and supernatural, he seems to have believed or understood little or nothing. He appears like a Rationalistic theolo gian, or Neologian, writing commentaries on an experimental process of grace, of which he does not credit the existence.

Yet, in the purest and serenest light, both of reason and of faith, Cowper himself was so fully persuaded that his recovery at St. Alban's, and his happiness afterward, had come from God and his grace; he knew this, with such perfect assurance, by the Spirit of God bearing witness with his own spirit; that even in a subsequent access of his malady, and under the depths of what seemed the darkness of absolute despair, he declared that it was not in the power of the arch-enemy himself to deprive him of that conviction. At a late period of his life, Cowper made, in one of his let

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ters, a striking remark, which he little knew was to become applicable (with what force and beauty!) to some of his own biographers. "The quarrel that the world has," said he, "with evangelic men and doctrines, they would have with a host of angels in the human form. For it is the quarrel of owls with sunshine; of ignorance with divine illumination."

CHAPTER XIII.

RECURRENCE OF COWPER'S MALADY.-ITS CONTINUANCE FOR SEVEN YEARS. HIS GRADUAL RETURN TO LITERARY EFFORT, AND HIS ENJOYMENT IN THE COMPOSITION OF HIS POETRY.

THE threatened access of his malady came with great suddenness in the month of January, 1773. A dim mysterious presentiment of it took possession of his soul in one of his solitary fieldwalks in the country, and he returned home and composed the last of the hymns contributed by him to the Olney Collection, and one of the most exquisitely beautiful and instructive among them all, "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." That holy and admirable composition was the only effort of his genius for nearly seven years, during which period, or the greater part of it, he was in the profoundest dejection of spirits, and sometimes in a state amounting to paroxyms of despair. Some years afterward, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, he described his condition under that attack, as follows:

"In the year 1773 the same scene that was

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acted at St. Alban's opened upon me again at Olney, only covered with a still deeper shade of melancholy, and ordained to be of much longer duration. I was suddenly reduced from my wonted state of understanding to an almost childish imbecility. I did not, indeed, lose my senses, but I lost the power to exercise them. I could return a rational answer, even to a difficult question; but a question was necessary, or I never spoke at all. This state of mind was accompanied, as I suppose it to be in most instances of the kind, with misapprehensions of things and persons that made me a very untractable patient. I believed that every body hated me, and that Mrs. Unwin hated me worst of all; was convinced that all my food was poisoned, together with ten thousand meagrims of the same stamp. Dr. Cotton was consulted. He replied that he could do no more for me than might be done at Olney, but recommended particular vigilance lest I should attempt my life, a caution for which there was the greatest occasion. At the same time that I was convinced of Mrs. Unwin's aversion to me, I could endure no other companion. The whole management of me consequently devolved upon her, and a terrible task she had. She performed it, however, with a cheerfulness hardly ever equaled on such an occasion, and I have often heard her say that if she ever praised God in her

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life, it was when she found that she was to have all the labor."

This second attack of his malady, though sudden and severe, was lighter than the first; but it continued much longer, and only by slow degrees did his mind regain its wonted strength and playfulness. It is not till near 1780 that his letters become frequent and full, and from that time ever after, though often exquisitely sportive and humorous, there was a tone of pensiveness, and often of the deepest melancholy in them; nor did he ever again in life enjoy, at any interval, the serene unclouded blissfulness of his first religious experience, but his path was always more or less in the valley of the shadow of death. When he began to recover, it was by gradual amusement and occupation, such as playing with his tame hares, gardening, building houses for his plants, and drawing, in which things he engaged as with the affectionate and playful spirit of a child; it was thus only that his mind resumed its active habits, and at length could come to the effort of literary composition. He wrote verses now and then for amusement, but compared his mind, in one of his letters to Mr. Newton, to a board under the plane of the carpenter, the shavings being his uppermost thoughts, nor likely to be ever any thing but shavings, though planed as thin as a wafer. "I can not bear much thinking," said he. "The

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