Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow—
'T was my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin, the Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling moments of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of the wild images with the stately and restrained language leaves an impression of awe, almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner away"; and again to the same faithful friend from Mundesley on the coast:
The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down from; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I passed sometimes within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me.
There is in this that sheer physical horror which it is not good to write or to read. Somewhere in his earlier letters he quotes the well-known line of Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt to death." How the commonplace words come back with frightfully intensified meaning as we read this story of decay! It is not good, I say, to see the nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly revealed. The mind reverts instinctively from this scene to the homely life at Olney. Might it not be that if Cowper had remained in that spot where the very stones of the garden walls were endeared to him, if he had never been torn from his natural connections—might it not be that he would have passed from the world in the end saddened but not frenzied by his dreams? At least in our thoughts let us leave him, not standing alone on the crumbling cliff over a hungry sea, but walking with his sympathetic companion arm in arm in the peaceful valley of the Ouse.
WHITTIER THE POET
Last month we took the new edition of Cowper's Letters as an occasion to consider the life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections of the home into English literature, and that may be our excuse for waiving the immediate pressure of the book-market and turning to the American poet whose inspiration springs largely from the same source. Different as the two writers are in so many respects, different above all in their education and surroundings, yet it would not be difficult to find points of resemblance to justify such a sequence. In both the spirit of religion was bound up with the cult of seclusion; to both the home was a refuge from the world; to both this comfort was sweetened by the care of a beloved companion, though neither of them ever married. But, after all, no apology is needed, I trust, for writing about a poet who is very dear to me as to many others, and who has suffered more than most at the hands of his biographers and critics.
It should seem that no one could go through Whittier's poems even casually without remarking the peculiar beauty of the idyl called The Pennsylvania Pilgrim. It is one of the longest and, all things considered, quite the most characteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard in his official biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor Carpenter names it in passing without a word of comment; and Colonel Higginson in his volume in the English Men of Letters Series does not mention it at all—but then he has a habit of omitting the essential. Among those who have written critically of American literature the poem is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracy of silence, as I hunted through one historian and critic after another, grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust my own judgment until I chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of Whittier's letters. Writing of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim to his publisher in May, 1872, he said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any long poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as long as Snow-Bound, and better, but nobody will find it out." One suspects that all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely followed the line of least resistance, without taking much care to form an independent opinion; and the line of least resistance has a miserable trick of leading us astray. In the first place, Whittier's share in the Abolition and other reforming movements bulks so large in the historians' eyes that sometimes they seem almost to forget Whittier the poet. And the critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier," says one of them, "will be remembered even more as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation than as the peaceful singer of rural New England."