That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of dreams: Actum est de te; periisti—it is done with thee, thou hast perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other."
But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the most part like a man of the world who has seen the fashions of life and has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance. Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful; there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city life—The Ballad Singers, The Rival Bells, the Epitaph on a Dog:
Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
Had he occasion for that staff, with which
He now goes picking out his path in fear
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
A firm foot forward still, till he had reached
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed:
To whom with loud and passionate laments
From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.
Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces—The Glowworm, The Jackdaw, The Cricket:
Little inmate, full of mirth,
Chirping on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat,
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.
Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song,
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear,
Melody throughout the year.
Neither night nor dawn of day
Puts a period to thy play:
Sing, then—and extend thy span
Far beyond the date of man;
Wretched man, whose years are spent
In repining discontent,
Lives not, agèd though he be,
Half a span, compared with thee.
There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own life, with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in the midst of London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it is scarcely fanciful to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in rural leisure passed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the year 1800. One is tempted to continue in the language of fable and ask what would have happened had the city mouse allured the country mouse to visit his chambers in Holborn or Southampton buildings. To be sure there was no luxury of purple robe and mighty feast in that abode; but I think the revelry and the wit, and that hound of intemperance which always pursued poor Lamb, would have frightened his guest back to his hiding-place in the wilderness: