IRRELIGIOUS CRITICISMS. 285 From such a disastrous twilight, between the daylight and the darkness, he looked back to his former happy, animated, heavenly state of mind, and described it under the false coloring that now fell upon it from the habit of his own despair. But these were not his views in that joyful period when his earnest conversations with his own beloved brother were made so eminently the means of bringing him also to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus; when his conversation and example shed such light and grace also upon the dear circle in which he moved in Olney, and when he composed those hymns, that have been God's manna to many a smitten soul in the wilderness, and will continue to be sung by the Church of God till time shall be no longer. Accordingly, from Cowper in gloom and darkness, we would appeal to Cowper walking in the light of his Redeemer's countenance; nay, we may appeal from Cowper's letter, to the tenor of his own exquisitely devout and beautiful poem on Conversation; and from the irreligious criticisms of the man of literature merely, we would appeal to the judgment of a mind impressed with the value of the soul, happy in the presence of Christ, and alive to a sense of eternal realities. Cowper's autobiography was written in the unclouded exercise of his reason, and with all the animated fervor and affection of a grateful heart, enjoying and praising God. The description of 286 IRRELIGIOUS CRITICISMS. his experience at St. Alban's, in a letter to Lady Hesketh many years afterward, and the review of his ardor, in the letter just quoted, were composed beneath the darkness of his long religious gloom. Yet Southey has the hardihood to remark that "the different state of mind in which Cowper described his malady at Olney to Lady Hesketh, from that in which he drew up the dreadful narrative of his madness in the Temple, and of his recovery at St. Albans, might induce, if not a belief of his perfect restoration, a reasonable hope of it. In the former instance (his conversion) he fully believed that the happy change which had taken place in him was supernatural; and of this both Mr. Newton and Mrs. Unwin were so thoroughly persuaded that many months elapsed after the second attack, violent as the access was, before they could bring themselves to ask Dr. Cotton's advice. They thought that the disease was the work of the Enemy, and that nothing less than Omnipotence could free him from it. Means they allowed were in general not only lawful but expedient; but his was a peculiar and exempt case, in which they were convinced that the Lord Jehovah would be alone deliverance was come. exalted when the day of Cowper had now learned to take a saner view of his own condition." It is painful to read such passages. They indicate, taken in connection with others, an almost PRESENCE OF THE TEMPTER. 287 malignant hostility against the manifestations of Divine grace, or rather against the belief that such exercises as Cowper passed through are the work of Divine grace in the heart. Southey sneers at the supposition of any thing supernatural in Cowper's happy change, and of course much more at the idea of there being any thing subter-natural, any thing of the workings of "the Enemy," in his malady. But there are not wanting passages in Cowper's own letters that look as if his mind were sometimes engaged in murky encounters with the Prince of Darkness; and it would be an interesting investigation to trace, in such a case, the evidences of the possible presence and power of such a Tempter. CHAPTER XXIII. COMPARISON OF COWPER'S EARLY SORROWS AND HIS LATE.-HIS WE are approaching now a very sad and gloomy period in Cowper's mental sufferings, when the fiends that had tracked his steps, or brushed past him with their dragon wings, or stood afar off and mocked him, seemed to close with him in a long and dreadful conflict. These terrors were real; and one need only compare the groans of a wounded spirit wrung out from his soul in these seasons of such painful endurance, with the tones of early sorrow from disappointed love expressed in the verses of his youth, to feel the tremendous difference between any mere earthly disappointment or grief, and the spiritual despair or darkness that separates the soul from God. Yet those early poems to the object of his youthful affections were beautiful, natural, unambitious, presenting plain indications of his genius; as indeed was the case EARLY POEMS. 289 with the very earliest of his compositions in poetical form known to have been preserved and idenfied; that admirable fragment written at Bath on finding the heel of a shoe, in 1748, when he had come to the age of seventeen. The characteristics of the future poet of "The Task" are there so plainly developed, that a page cut from that poem itself would not have a more manifest resemblance; a very singular phenomenon indeed; the style, the humor, the language, the rhythm, all plainly foreshadowed, and the identity of manner maintained through the interval (in his case no small time so confused and chaotic) between seventeen and fifty. In one of his letters he speaks of having written ballads at a period as early as the age of fourteen, having received a taste for that form of poetry from his own father, who himself was the author of several pieces. He also tried his hand at some of the Elegies of Tibullus; but none of those pieces he could afterward remember or recover. In one of his poetical epistles to Miss Theodora Cowper in 1755, there occur the following lines, which seem to have been written in allusion to the refusal of her father to grant his sanction for their engagement, his reasons for the inflexible determination being first, their degree of relationship, and second, Cowper's own want of fortune for their |