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HAYLEY AT WESTON.

could manifest the least sign of pleasure at his presence; although a few months before, nothing on earth except the presence of Lady Hesketh, whom he loved with as much tenderness as a sister, could have given him such delight as Hayley's visit.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

COWPER'S COMPLAINT AND JEREMIAH'S.— -SINCERITY OF COWPER IN EVERY EXPRESSION OF CHRISTIAN FEELING.-LETTER TO MR. ROSE.-LETTERS TO UNWIN AND NEWTON.-CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE IN SPITE OF DESPAIR-CHRISTIAN SYMPATHY IN OTHERS' TRIALS.-POEM ON THE FOUR AGES.-MRS. UNWIN'S ILLNESS AND COWPER'S GLOOM.-POEM TO MARY.

THE first eighteen verses of the third chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah are a most perfect representation of the belief and experience of Cowper for the greater part of twenty years. "I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath. He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely, against me He is turned; He turneth His hand against me all the day. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about that I can not get out; He hath made my chain heavy. Also, when I cry and shout, He shutteth out my prayer. He hath filled me with bitterness, He hath made me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravelstones, He hath covered me with ashes. And

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THE MOURNING PROPHET.

I said, My strength and my hope are perished from the Lord."

But the misery of Cowper was, that in his case, that which, with the afflicted and mourning prophet, was the language of grief and of hopelessness in regard to the overwhelming external desolations that had overtaken his beloved country in God's wrath (and he himself a hopeless sufferer in all those calamities), described a personal despair. The prophet could say, after all this most graphic catalogue of his woes, "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him: to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. For the Lord will not cast off forever; but though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. I called upon Thy name, O Lord, out of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice. Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee, thou saidst, Fear not. O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul, Thou hast redeemed my life."

But Cowper's inexorable despair was continually crying, God is against me; I am cut off forever from the light of the living, from the possibility of His mercy. Actum est de te; periisti: My hope is perished from the Lord forever! And

HOPE IMPERISHABLE.

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often he was compelled to cry out with the Psalmist, "While I suffer Thy terrors, I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves."

Yet never did Cowper's confidence in God's goodness fail; and even through all this thick spiritual darkness, he was full of gratitude for the providential mercies of his Heavenly Father while reason remained; nor did any Christian ever take greater delight in observing and recounting the footsteps of God's providence, and the marks of His interposing love. He was always ready to say with Jeremiah, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness."

Moreover, we have seen at the bottom of all Cowper's complaints some remnant still of hope, some persevering conviction, as obstinate as his despair itself, of the possibility that God might yet interpose in his behalf, and deliver him from what would then and thus be demonstrated to have been the affliction of insanity, an imagination of a banishment from God, the work of an unsettled reason under the buffetings of malignant spiritual foes. And we must bear in mind the anxious sincerity and carefulness of Cowper in every expression of his feelings, not to transcend the limits of his own actual experience in any

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CHRISTIAN HOPE.

Christian sentiment to which he ever gave utter

ance.

The exquisite simplicity and transparency of his heart as well as intellect, his freedom from all pretense and guile, and from all affectation of any kind of ability or attainment which he did not possess, are to be remembered in perusing Cowper's letters of sympathy with the sorrows of his dearest friends. When we find him saying in effect, Courage, my brother! we shall soon rejoin our lost one, and many whom we have tenderly loved, "our forerunners into a better country," the consolation is so conveyed that we should feel as if it were almost a deception, if the writer himself were not a partaker of it. Just so, in all those sweet allusions now and then in Cowper's letters to the grounds of a Christian hope; they are so expressed that it is impossible not to feel assured that they do not and can not proceed from a heart that feels as if God were an enemy, or believes that its own sins are not and can not be forgiven. There is the Christian hope in such expressions, by whatever depths of doubt surrounded. Take, for instance, the close of a letter, in 1791, to the Rev. Walter Bagot. "If God forgive me my sins, surely I shall love Him much, for I have much to be forgiven. But the quantum need not discourage me, since there is One whose atonement can suffice for all.”