"I may be prejudiced against these [Americans], but I do not think them equal to the task of establishing an empire.... You will suppose me a politician; but, in truth, I am nothing less. These are the thoughts that occur to me while I read the newspaper; and when I have laid it down, I feel myself more interested in the success of my 'early cucumbers' than in any part of this important subject."[[13]]
His Later Life.
It was only in the latter part of his career that the poet made the acquaintance of William Hayley,[[14]] his future biographer, who had been drawn toward Cowper by the charms of his verse and who came to visit him: this friend, through his wide familiarity with the outer world, had suborned bishops and clergy and public men to write to this melancholy exile of Olney and cheer him with their praises—all which praises fell like hail upon Cowper's window pane. And there had been a little trip devised, to divert that weakened and fatigued mind, down to Eartham in Sussex, where his friend Hayley has a beautiful place, and where he brings the artist Romney, to paint the well-known portrait; but there is no long stay away from the old covert on the flats of Buckinghamshire; indeed this covert had taken new life within a few years by the advent of a cousin, the Lady Hesketh, the widowed sister of his old lost Theodora; she had come with her carriage and trappings, and taken a fine house, and sought to revive pleasantly all the mundane influences of Lady Austen.
From Olney there had come about in those times—at the wise suggestion of Lady Hesketh—a move over to the near village of Weston, which thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years ago—moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet—I strolled down from Newport Pagnell—to which place I had taken coach from Northampton—following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak" inn, I found next door his old home—its front overgrown with roses—and strolled into his old garden; and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white tasselled night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.]
It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was—if not undertaken—most largely wrought upon. The regular occupation involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not "gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far from the "hollow" ships.
In the intervals of this important labor—which was only fairly successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as Crabbe gained at a later day—only chance things were written. But some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful issues. That relating to his mother's picture—sent to him by some cousinly hand—a flashing from the embers of his life, as it were, the reader must know; who knows it too well?
"Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me.
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"