THERE is scarcely any ground in England so well known in imagination as the haunts of Cowper at Olney and Weston; there is little that is so interesting to the lover of moral and religious poetry. There the beautiful but unhappy poet seemed to have created a new world out of unknown ground, in which himself and his friends, the Unwins, Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh, the Throckmortons, and the rest, played a part of the simplest and most natural character, and which fascinated the whole public mind. The life, the spirit, and the poetry of Cowper present, when taken together, a most singular combination. He was timid in his habit, yet bold in his writing; melancholy in the tone of his mind, but full of fun and playfulness in his correspondence; wretched to an extraordinary degree, he yet made the whole nation merry with his John Gilpin and other humorous writings; despairing even of God's mercy and of salvation, his religious poetry is of the most cheerful and even triumphantly glad character;

Filled with this joyous assurance, wherever he turns his eye on the magnificent spectacle of creation, he finds themes of noblest gratulation. He looks into the heavens, and exclaims :

He is indeed a Freeman: free by birth

Of no mean city, planned or ere the hills

Were built, the fountains opened, or the sea

With all his roaring multitude of waves."-The Task, took v.

The writings of Cowper testify everywhere to that grand sermon which is eternally preaching in the open air; to that Gospel of the field and the forest, which, like the Gospel of Christ, is the voice of that love which overflows the universe; which puts down all sectarian bitterness in him who listens to it; which, being perfect, "casts out all fear," against which the gloom of bigots and the terrors of fanatics cannot stand. It was this which healed his wounded spirit beneath the boughs of Yardly Chase, and came fanning his temples with a soothing freshness in the dells of Weston. When we follow his footsteps there, we somewhat wonder that scenes so unambitious could so enrapture him; but the glory came from within, and out of the materials of an ordinary walk he could raise a brilliant superstructure for eternity.

William Cowper was born in the parsonage of Great Berkhampstead. The Birmingham railway whirls you now past the spot, or you may, if you please, alight and survey that house hallowed by the love of a mother such as he has described, and by the record of it in those inimitable verses of the son on receiving her picture.

"Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more,
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,

Drew me to school along the public way,

Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped.

'Tis now become a history little known,

That once we called the pastoral house our own."

Cowper was at school at Market-street, Hertfordshire, then at Westminster; after which he was articled for three years to Mr. Chapman, a solicitor. After quitting Mr. Chapman, he entered the Inner Temple, as a regular law student; where his associates were Thurlow, afterwards the well-known Lord Chancellor, Bonnel Thornton, and Colman. Cowper's family was well connected, both on the father's and mother's side, and he had every prospect of advancement; but this the sensitiveness of his nature prevented. Being successively appointed to the offices of Reading Clerk, Clerk of the Private Committees in the House of Lords, and Clerk of the Journals, he was so overwhelmed by being unexpectedly called on to discharge his duty publicly before the House, that it unsettled his mind, his prospects of a worldly nature were for ever over, and in a state of the most settled melancholy he was committed to the care of Dr. Cotton of St. Alban's. In the summer of 1765 he quitted St. Alban's, and retired to private lodgings in the town of Huntingdon. There he was, as by a direct act of Providence, led to the acquaintance of the family of the Rev. Mr. Unwin, one of the clergymen of the place. Cowper had attended his church; and his interesting appearance having attracted the attention of his son William Cawthorne Unwin, he followed him in his solitary walk,

and introduced himself to him. This simple fact decided, as by the very finger of heaven, the whole destiny of the poet, and probably secured him as a poet to the world. With this family he entered into the most affectionate intimacy. They were people after his own heart, pious, intelligent, and most amiable. The father was, however, soon after killed by a fall from his horse, the son was himself become a minister, and the widow, the ever-to-be-loved Mary Unwin, retired with the suffering poet to Olney, at the invitation of the Rev. John Newton, the clergyman there, where she watched over him with the tender solicitude of a mother. To her, in all probability, we owe all that we possess in the poetry of Cowper.

With his life here we are made familiar by his poetry and letters, and the biography of Hayley. His long returns of melancholy, the writing of poetry, which Mrs. Unwin suggested to him to divert his thoughts, his gardening, his walks, his tame hares, his successive acquaintances with Lady Austen, Lady Hesketh, and the like, all this we know. What particularly concerns us is, the present state and appearances of his homes and haunts here. To these the access is now easy. From the Wolverton station, on the North-western railway, an omnibus sets you down, after a run of nine miles, at the Bull inn, in the spacious, still, and triangular market-place of Olney. Here, again, prints have made us most accurately acquainted with the place. The house occupied by Cowper stands near the eastern corner, loftily overtopping all the rest. There are the other quiet, cottage-like houses stretching away right and left, the tall elm-tree, the pump, the old octagon stone lock-up house. The house which was Cowper's makes an imposing appearance in a picture, and in reality is a building of considerable size; but it must always have been internally an ill-finished house. He himself, and his friends, compared it to a prison. It had no charms whatever of location. Opposite to it came crowding up some common dwellings, behind lay the garden, on a dead flat, and therefore with no attractions but such as art and a poet's imagination gave it. It was, for some years after he quitted it, inhabited by a surgeon. He had, in his turn, long left it; and it now was divided into three tenements. One was a little grocer's shop, the other part in front was an infant school, and the back part a workshop of some kind. The house was altogether dingy and desolate, and bore no marks of having at any time been finished in a superior style. That which was once the garden was now divided into a back-yard and a small garden surrounded by a high stone wall. They show an apple-tree in it, which they say Cowper planted. The other and main portion of the garden was cut off by the stone wall, and the access to it was from a distant part of the town. This garden was now in the possession of Mr. Morris, a master bootmaker, who, with a genuine feeling of respect for the poet's memory, not only retained it as much as possible in the state in which it was in Cowper's time, but had the most good-natured pleasure in allowing strangers to see it. The moment I presented myself at his door, he came out, anticipating my object, with the key, and proffered his own guidance. In the garden, about the

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centre, still stands Cowper's summer-house. It is a little square tenement, (as Cowper describes it himself, in one of his letters,) not much bigger than a sedan-chair. It is of timber, framed and plastered, and the roof of old red tiles. It has a wooden door on the side next to his own house, and a glass one, serving as window, exactly opposite, and looking across the next orchard to the parsonage. There is a bench on each side, and the ceiling is so low that a man of moderate stature cannot stand upright in it. Except in hot weather, it must have been a regular wind-trap. It is, of course, written all over with verses, and inscribed with names. Around it stand evergreens, and in the garden remain various old fruit-trees, which were there in Cowper's time, and some of them, no doubt, planted by him. The back of some low cottages, with their windows level with the very earth, forms part of the boundary wall; and the orchard, in front of the summer-house, remains as in Cowper's time. It will be recollected that, in order to save himself the trouble of going round through the town, Cowper had a gate put out into this orchard, and another into the orchard of the Rectory, in which lived his friend Mr. Newton. He paid a pound a year for thus crossing his neighbour's orchard, but had, by this means, not only a very near cut to the Parsonage opened to him, but a whole quiet territory of orchards. This still remains. A considerable extent of orchards, bounded, for the most part, by the backs of the town houses, presents a little quiet region, in which the poet could ramble and muse at his own pleasure. The Parsonage, a plain, modern, and not large building, is not very distant from the front of the summer-house, and over it peeps the church spire. One cannot help reflecting how often the poet and his friends used to go to and fro there. Newton, with his genuine friendship for Cowper, but with his severe and predestinarian religion, which to Cowper's grieving spirit was terrifying and prostrating; then, a happy change, the lively and affectionate and witty Lady Austen, to whom we owe John Gilpin and The Task. Too lively, indeed, was this lady, charming as she was, for the nerves and the occupations of the poet. She went, and then came that delightful and true-souled cousin, Lady Hesketh, a sister as Mary Unwin was a mother to the poet. She had lived much abroad, from the days in which Cowper and herself, merry companions, had laughed and loved each other dearly as cousins. The fame of him whom she had gone away deploring, as blighted and lost for ever, met her on her return to her native land, a widow; and, with a heart and a purse equally open, she hastened to renew the intercourse of her youth, and to make the poet's life as happy as such hearts only could make him. There is nothing more delightful than to see how the bursting-forth fame of Cowper brought around him at once all his oldest and best friends-his kith and kin, who had deemed him a wreck, and found him a gallant bark, sailing on the brightest sea of glory to a sacred immortality.

Lady Hesketh, active in her kindness as she was beautiful in person and in spirit, a true sisterly soul, lost no time in removing Cowper to a more suitable house and neighbourhood. Of the house

we have spoken. The situation of Olney is on the flat, near the river Ouse, and subject to its fogs. The town was dull. It is much now as it was then; one of those places that are the links between towns and villages. Its present population is only 2,300. In such a place, therefore, every man knew all his neighbours' concerns. It was too exposed a place for a man of Cowper's shy disposition, and yet had none of that bustle which gives a stimulus to get out of it into the country. Removing from it to the country was but passing from stillness to stillness. The country around Olney, moreover, is by no means striking in its features. It is like a thousand other parts of England, somewhat flat, yet somewhat undulating, and rather naked of trees. Weston, to which he now removed, was about a mile westward of Olney. It lies on higher ground, overlooking the valley of the Ouse. It is a small village, consisting of a few detached houses on each side of the road. The Hall stood at this end, and the neat little church at the other. Trees grew along the street, and Cowper pronounced it one of the prettiest villages of England. Luckily he had neither seen all the villages of England, nor the finest scenery of this or other countries. To him, therefore, the country was all that he imagined of lovely, and all that he desired. It never tired, it never lost its hold upon his fancy and his heart.

"Scenes must be beautiful, which daily viewed
Please daily, and where novelty survives
Long knowledge, and the scrutiny of years.
Praise justly due to those that I describe."

This he said of this scenery around Weston; and in setting out for that village from Olney, we take the track which, even before he went to live there, was his daily and peculiarly favourite walk. Advancing out of Olney street, we are at once on an open ascent on the highway. At a mile's distance before us lie Weston and its woods; its little church-tower overlooking the valley of the Ouse. Behind us lies Olney, its tall church spire rising nobly into the sky; and close beneath it the Ouse emerges into sight, sweeping round the water-mills which figure in the poet's works, and then goes in several different streams, as he says, lazily along a fine stretch of green meadows, in which the scenes of The Dog and Water-lily, and The Poplar Field occur. On this eminence stood Cowper often, with Mary Unwin on his arm; and thus he addresses her, as he describes most vividly the view:

"And witness, dear companion of my walks,
Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
Fast locked in mine, with pleasure such as love,
Confirmed by long experience of thy worth
And well-tried virtues could alone inspire-
Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.
Thou knowest my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

How oft upon yon eminence our pace

Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne

The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,

While admiration, feeding at the eye,

And still unsated dwelt upon the scene!

Thence with what pleasure we have just discerned