So the dreamy, strange, yet often too realistic life of Cowper passed away toward the last decade of the eighteenth century, and, like most poets, he has left behind him the immortalized memory of the pure and noble women who loved him with the love of a guardian angel. No man ever needed it more, and in this case indeed God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.
LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER
FROM THE FRENCH.
December 12, 1868.
With the fall of the leaves of autumn the cemeteries become populous. The year 1868, as formerly 183-, will have been fatal to great men. Berryer is dead! A great voice silenced. “I shall not, then, see the happiness of France!” he said a little time before his death—this holy death which has worthily crowned the good and noble life of a man exceptionally great both as regards the intellect and the heart. How all things pass and fade away! Oh! how sad is this world, in which so many separations and farewells are the prelude to the last great separation at death. Violeau, the sweet Breton poet, in writing to his friend Pierre Javouhey, said:
Adieu, toujours adieu! C’est le cri de la terre.
L’homme n’est que regrets en son cœur solitaire:
Le bâton voyageur, le voile et le linceul