Towards the end of October, this interesting party retired from the coast to the house of Mr. Johnson, in Dereham—a house now chosen for their winter residence, as Dunham-Lodge appeared to them too dreary.
The long and exemplary life of Mrs. Unwin was drawing towards a close:—the powers of nature were gradually exhausted, and on the seventeenth of December she ended a troubled existence, distinguished by a sublime spirit of piety and friendship, that shone through long periods of calamity, and continued to glimmer through the distressful twilight of her declining faculties. Her death was calm and tranquil. Cowper saw her about half an hour before the moment of expiration, which passed without a struggle or a groan, as the clock was striking one in the afternoon.
On the morning of that day, he said to the servant who opened the window of his chamber, "Sally, is there life above stairs?" A striking proof of his bestowing incessant attention on the sufferings of his aged friend, although he had long appeared almost totally absorbed in his own.
In the dusk of the evening he attended Mr. Johnson to survey the corpse; and after looking at it a very few moments he started suddenly away, with a vehement but unfinished sentence of passionate sorrow. He spoke of her no more.
She was buried by torch-light, on the twenty-third of December, in the north aisle of Dereham church; and two of her friends, impressed with a just and deep sense of her extraordinary merit, have raised a marble tablet to her memory with the following inscription:
IN MEMORY OF MARY,
WIDOW OF THE REV. MORLEY UNWIN,
AND
MOTHER OF THE REV. WILLIAM CAWTHORN UNWIN,
BORN AT ELY, 1724.
BURIED IN THIS CHURCH 1796.
Trusting in God, with all her heart and mind
This woman prov'd magnanimously kind;
Endur'd affliction's desolating hail,
And watch'd a poet thro' misfortune's vale.
Her spotless dust, angelic guards, defend!
It is the dust of Unwin, Cowper's friend!
That single title in itself is fame,
For all who read his verse revere her name.
It might have been anticipated that the death of Mrs. Unwin, in Cowper's enfeebled state, would have proved too severe a shock to his agitated nerves. But it is mercifully ordained that, while declining years incapacitate us for trials, they, at the same time, weaken the sensibility to suffering, and thereby render us less accessible to the influence of sorrow. It may be regarded as an instance of providential mercy to this afflicted poet, that his aged friend, whose life he had so long considered as essential to his own, was taken from him at a time when the pressure of his malady, a perpetual low fever, both of body and mind, had, in a great degree, diminished the native energy of his faculties and affections.
Owing to these causes, Cowper was so far preserved in this season of trial, that, instead of mourning the loss of a person in whose life he had seemed to live, all perception of that loss was mercifully taken from him; and, from the moment when he hurried away from the inanimate object of his filial attachment, he appeared to have no memory of her having existed, for he never asked a question concerning her funeral, nor ever mentioned her name.
Towards the summer of 1797, his bodily health appeared to improve, but not to such a degree as to restore any comfortable activity to his mind. In June he wrote a brief letter to Hayley, but such as too forcibly expressed the cruelty of his distemper.