Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in—

all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only interesting in itself, but gains a double charm by association with the letters. "We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs. Unwin's son, "when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for the hares being loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is fortunate for the reader if his memory at these words calls up those lines of The Task:

One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.
Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening, and at night retire secure To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way—the walks about Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the American Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand other matters that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance. For it must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least, was ever dull. I will quote the opening paragraph of one other letter—to his friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher of Newport Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3] "smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear Taureau"—as a change from the more serious theme, and then pass on:

Mon aimable et très cher Ami—It is not in the power of chaises or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow you; if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I should not love you the less; but should contemplate the place of your abode, as often as it appeared in the heavens, and say—Farewell, my friend, forever! Lost, but not forgotten! Live happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder of thy pipes in peace! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its cares, and so far can I rejoice in thy removal.

Might not that have been written by Lamb to one of his cronies—by a Lamb still of the eighteenth century?

But the Olney days must come to a close. After nineteen years of residence there Cowper and his companion (was ever love like theirs, that was yet not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, a more convenient house in the village of Weston Underwood, not far away. Somehow, with the change, the letters lose the freshness of their peculiar interest. We shall never again find him writing of his home as he had written before of Olney:

The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there are no moats about my castle, no locks upon my gates of which I have not the key; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a local attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt, even to the place of my birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for bounds which I cannot pass.... The very stones in the garden-walls are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest object, and be disagreeably affected by its removal, and am persuaded that, were it possible I could leave this incommodious nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture, and be transported with the sight of objects which to all the world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps, such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls of the neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so, because here is to be my abode, and because such is the appointment of Him that placed me in it.

Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never turned the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to him now. His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is neither quite of the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is busy—endlessly, wearisomely busy—with his translation of Homer. I have often wondered what the result would have been had his good friends and neighbours the Throckmortons converted him from his rigid Calvinism to their own milder Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to writing another Task. Idle conjecture! For the rest of his life he toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did not want and which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes the pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over her sick companion:

The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!