harassed our afflicted bard, viz., the death of Dr. Unwin, rector of Stock. • Our author's Homer was published in July 1791; but from this period he was frequently occupied in revising it for subsequent impressions, until a few months before his death, little else of a literary character attracting his attention. In the year 1794, the disease to which Cowper was subject, fastened upon him with a feverish and heart-destroying grasp; the bodily infirmity of Mrs. Unwin pressed with accumulating weight on her. She had some years previously had an attack of paralysis, which had greatly broken in upon her constitution, and from which she had never perfectly recovered. These two suffering mortals were now under the kind care of Cowper's kinsman, the Rev. Mr. Johnson, whose residence was in Norfolk, to which place the afflicted couple were removed, Here Mrs. Unwin breathed her last on the 17th of December, 1796; and her death, although at some previous period it would most probably have overwhelmed Cowper in despair, was now witnessed by him with apparent insensibility; he gazed on her corpse, he passed from the mournful scene in silence, and was never from this time heard to utter her name. About this time, Cowper received a pension of £300 per annum; but of this well merited reward he appears to have taken but little or no notice. A few years passed on, during which our auther at occasional intervals produced a few minor poems, and revised some passages in his Homer; at length, however, it was apparent to his friends, that the earthly career of the poet was shortly to terminate, and on the 25th of April, 1800, Cowper breathed his last. His remains were deposited in St. Edmund's Chapel, East Doreham Church, where a monument with an inscription by Hayley, is erected to his memory. Of Cowper as a poet, various opinions have been expressed by different writers. Some, yet those are few, labouring with unwearied zeal to show that his name, amongst the most renowned of our British bards, deserves only a secondary place; whilst others maintain, with equal zeal, that he deserves to be placed among the most illustrious of our English poets. We hesitate not to say, that our opinion fully coincides with the latter; the intermixture of simplicity and elegance which are to be found in his productions, entitles him to be placed side by side with Milton, Pope, Dryden, Goldsmith, &c. Those who are competent to judge, have ever been ready to extol the beauties which adorn the poems of Cowper, and rank him among the foremost on the mount of Parnassus. We hope to be excused in closing this brief sketch, if we add the opinion of a writer on the poetical genius of Cowper, the language which it breathes is quite in accordance with our own opinion. "The rise of this great moral poet marks a distinct and most resplendent era in the annals of our country's literature. He ranks among the foremost of those intellectual Anakim who have achieved the mightiest victories of British song. The man of his own deeds, the sole and unassisted architect of his own immortality, he has built for himself a fabric which, though pecullar in design and utterly unlike the monumental structures of his brethren, is yet of perfect and consistent symmetry. He belonged to no school; he copied no one's manner. His style of thought and of expression, his choice and treatment of subject, his metaphors and illustrations, even the cadences and pauses of his verse, are all emphatically self-orignated and his own. He was the first who dared to lay aside that artificial phraseology and complicated rhythmus, which the longadmitted supremacy and frequent imitation of Pope had sanctioned as the exclusive form of narrative or didactic poetry. The cœesural balance of antitheses had, in itself, no singular and overmastering charm for him: the prerogative authority of names and arbitrary customs he boldly set at defiance, and feared not to assert the native individual liberty of creation. He avoided, also, equally with that of his precursors, the error into which too many of his successors have inadvertently fallen. In none of Cowper's writings, not even in their most vigorous bursts of passion, have we aught that can be censured as ambiguous or unintelligible. Nowhere do we discover any traces of that undisciplined and perplexing inspiration, if such it must be called, which, disdaining the coercion of an intellectual law, attempts to give utterance to its oracles in a language of its own, and discards their natural interpreter. In all his poems, we do not remember a single obscure, confusing or inexplicable passage; nor one of indefinite and undefinable significance. In the works of Byron and our own contemporaries, such passages are met with in almost every page; but in Cowper they are not. Everywhere his meaning is perspicuous, as his sentiments are high and generous. His images, his characters, the total contexture of his verse, are ail impregnated with the nobility and intrinsic grandeur of his mind, and imbued with that benign and gracious spirit of Christian virtue which was as the pure breath and blood of his ideal progeny. His victories were not the stained and perishing achievements of rebellious power; not the inglorious triumphs of perverted genius, nor the subjugation of all hearts to the dominion of voluptuous melody and magical illusion: he raised no idols; he set up no golden images. His were unsullied and memorably peaceful conquests; conquests of passions and prejudices; of the ignorance, the follies, and the vices of mankind; conquests illustrated by splendours to which the thrones and chariots of the imperial pageantry of Rome were but as toys and baubles, invested with the undying glories of a spiritual consecration and the imperishable lustre of religion." |