The frequent change of place, and the magnificence of marine scenery, produced at times a little relief to his depressed spirits. On the 7th of June 1798, he surveyed the light-house at Happisburgh, and expressed some pleasure on beholding, through a telescope, several ships at a distance. Yet, in his usual walk with his companion by the sea-side, he exemplified but too forcibly his own affecting description of melancholy silence:
That silent tongue
Could give advice, could censure, or commend,
Or charm the sorrows of a drooping friend;
Renounc'd alike its office and its sport,
Its brisker and its graver strains fall short:
Both fail beneath a fever's secret sway,
And, like a summer-brook, are past away.
On the twenty-fourth of July, Cowper had the honour of a visit from a lady, for whom he had long entertained affectionate respect, the Dowager Lady Spencer—and it was rather remarkable, that on the very morning she called upon him he had begun his revisal of the Odyssey, which was originally inscribed to her. Such an incident in a happier season would have produced a very enlivening effect on his spirits: but, in his present state, it had not even the power to lead him into any free conversation with his distinguished visitor.
The only amusement that he appeared to admit without reluctance was the reading of his kinsman, who, indefatigable in the supply of such amusement, had exhausted a successive series of works of fiction, and at this period began reading to the poet his own works. To these he listened also in silence, and heard all his poems recited in order, till the reader arrived at the history of John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. Mr. Johnson proceeded to his manuscript poems; to these he willingly listened, but made not a single remark on any.
In October 1798, the pressure of his melancholy seemed to be mitigated in some little degree, for he exerted himself so far as to write the following letter, without solicitation, to Lady Hesketh.
Dear Cousin,—You describe delightful scenes, but you describe them to one, who, if he even saw them, could receive no delight from them: who has a faint recollection, and so faint, as to be like an almost forgotten dream, that once he was susceptible of pleasure from such causes. The country that you have had in prospect has been always famed for its beauties; but the wretch who can derive no gratification from a view of nature, even under the disadvantage of her most ordinary dress, will have no eyes to admire her in any.
In one day, in one minute, I should rather have said, she became an universal blank to me, and though from a different cause, yet with an effect as difficult to remove as blindness itself.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mundsley, Oct. 13, 1798.