Cowper was much attached to Rose. Speaking of his departure: ‘When a friend leaves me, I always feel at my heart a possibility that perhaps we have met for the last time, and that before the return of summer, robins may be whistling over the grave of one of us.’
Our poet was very fond of mere rhyming, and did not despise doggerel, for we can call the Lines to his ‘dearest Coz,’ after the manner of Shenstone, by no other name,—being an inventory of all his goods and chattels, including the cap, so thoroughly identified with his image in our minds. It was the fashion of the day, more especially for literary men, to lay aside the heavy periwig, and don this most unbecoming but, we imagine, more comfortable head-gear.
‘The cap which so stately appears,
With ribbon-bound tassel, on high,’
was the gift of his Harriet, and so were the bookshelves, the chairs, tables,—all enumerated in verse—‘endearing his abode,’ by recalling the memory of her, from whom he daily expects a visit, only she is in attendance on
‘The oldest and dearest of friends,
Whose dial-plate points to eleven,...
And who waits but a passage to heaven.’
And the hour struck very shortly after, for Lady Hesketh’s father, Ashley Cowper.
In the sylvan glades of Yardley Chase, rich in fine old timber, stood an ancient oak, the frequent goal of the poet’s rambles, to which he wrote an address. The tree still bears his name, and ‘Cowper’s Oak’ is the meeting-place of two packs of hounds. Many a bright morning since our poet’s time have the woods of old Yardley echoed to the sound of the huntsman’s horn and the baying of the deep-mouthed ‘beauties.’