'That with its wearisome, but needful length,
Bestrides the wintry flood'
between Olney and Emberton; here, bosomed in its embowering trees, the little farmhouse called the 'Peasant's Nest.' Here, again, in the valley, and framed between the feathery branches of the shrubbery, is the spire of Olney Church, from which one may almost fancy that
'the sound of cheerful bells .
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear;'
here, standing out whitely from the yews and evergreens of The Wilderness, the urn with the epitaph of Neptune. Farther on (a lovely little landscape) is the clump of poplars by the water (not the poplars of the poem: those were already felled) which the poet mistook for elms; and here, lastly, is Cowper's own cottage at Weston, which, with its dormer windows, and its vines and jasmines, might have served as a model for Randolph Caldecott or Kate Greenaway. And, behold! ('blest be the art that can immortalize!') here is Mrs. Unwin in a high waist entering at the gate, while Cowper bids her welcome from the doorway.
Of Olney itself there are not many glimpses in the little volume. But the vignette on the title-page shows the tiny 'boudoir' or summerhouse, 'not much bigger than a sedan chair,' which stood—nay, stands yet—about midway between the red-brick house on the market-place and what was once John Xewton's vicarage. It is still, say the latest accounts, kept up by its present owner, and its walls and ceiling are covered with the autographs of pious pilgrims. In Storer's plate you look in at the open door, catching, through the window on the opposite side, part of the parsonage and of the wall in which was constructed the gate that enabled Cowper at all times to communicate with his clerical friend. Its exact dimensions are given as six feet nine by five feet five; and he must have been right in telling Lady Hesketh that if she came to see him they should be 'as close-pack'd as two wax figures in an old-fashioned picture-frame.' A trap-door or loose board in the floor covered a receptacle in which the previous tenant, an apothecary, had stored his bottles; and here, 'in the deep-delved earth,' one of Cowper's wisest counsellors, the Rev. William Bull of Newport Pagnell, the 'Carissimus Taurorum' of the letters, the
'smoke-inhaling Bull,
Always filling, never full,'
was wont to deposit his pipes and his tobacco. 'Having furnished it with a table and two chairs,' says Cowper, * here I write all that I write in summer time, whether to my friends or the public. It is secure from all noise, and a refuge from all intrusion, for intruders sometimes trouble me in the winter evenings at Olney, but (thanks to my boudoir!) I can now hide myself from them.'