The exquisite sensibility of Cowper could not fail to suffer deeply on the loss of such a brother; but it is the peculiar blessing of a religious turn of mind, that it serves as an antidote against the corrosive influence of sorrow. Devotion, if it had no other beneficial effect on the human character, would be still inestimable to man, as a medicine for the anguish he feels in losing the objects of his affection. How far it proved so in the present case the reader will be enabled to judge by a letter, in which Cowper describes his sensations on this awful event to one of his favourite correspondents.

LETTER XXI.

To Mrs. COWPER, Holles-Street, Cavendish

DEAR COUSIN,

Square.

Olney, June 7, 1770.

I am obliged to you for sometimes thinking of an unseen friend, and bestowing a letter upon me. It gives me pleasure to hear from you, especially to find that our gracious Lord enables you to weather out the storms you meet with, and to cast anchor within the veil.

You judge rightly of the manner in which I have been affected by the Lord's late dispensation towards my brother. I found in it cause of sorrow, that I lost so near a relation, and one so deservedly dear to me, and that he left me just when our sentiments upon the most interesting subject became the same; but much more cause of joy, that it pleased God to give me clear and evident proof that he had changed his heart, and adopted him into the number of his children. For this I hold myself peculiarly bound to thank him, because he might have done all that he was pleased to do for him, and yet have afforded him neither strength nor

•pportunity to declare it. I doubt not that he enlightens the understandings, and works a gracious change in the hearts of many in their last moments, whose surrounding friends are not made acquainted with it.

He told me, that from the time he was first ordained he began to be dissatisfied with his religious opinions, and to suspect that there were greater things concealed in the Bible than were generally believed or allowed to be there. From the time when I first visited him after my release from St. Alban's, he began to read upon the subject. It was at that time I informed him of the views of divine truth which I had received in that school of affliction. He laid what I said to heart, and begun to furnish himself with the best writers on the controverted points, whose works he read with great diligence and attention, comparing them all the while with the Scripture. None ever truly and ingenuously sought the truth but they found it. A spirit of earnest inquiry is the gift of God, who never says to any, seek ye my face in vain. Accordingly, about ten days before his death, it pleased the Lord to dispel all his doubts, to reveal in his heart the knowledge of the Saviour; and to give him firm and unshaken peace in the belief of his ability and willingness to save. As to the affair of the fortune-teller, he never mentioned it to me, nor was there any such paper found as you mention. I looked over all his papers before I left the place, and, had there been such a one, must have discovered it. I have heard the report from other quarters, but no other particulars than that the woman foretold him when he should die. I suppose there may be some truth in the matter; but whatever he might think of it before his knowledge of the truth, and however extraordinary her predictions might really be, I am satisfied that he had then received far other views of the wisdom and

majesty of God than to suppose that he would entrust his secret counsels to a vagrant, who did not mean, I suppose, to be understood to have received her intelligence from the Fountain of Light, but thought herself sufficiently honoured by any who would give her credit for a secret intercourse of this kind with the Prince of Darkness.

Mrs. Unwin is much obliged to you for your kind inquiry after her. She is well, I thank God, as usual, and sends her respects to you. Her son is in the ministry, and has the Living of Stock, in Essex. We were last week alarmed with an account of his being dangerously ill. Mrs. Unwin went to see him, and in a few days left him out of danger.

The letters of the afflicted Poet to this amiable and sympathetic relation have already afforded to my reader an insight of the pure recesses of Cowper's wonderful mind at some remarkable periods of his life, and if my reader's opinion of these letters is consonant to my own, he will feel concerned, as I do, to find a chasm of ten years in this valuable correspondence; the more so, as it was chiefly occasioned by a new, a long, and severe visitation of that mental malady, which periodically involved in calamitous oppression the superior faculties of this interesting sufferer. His extreme depression seems not to have recurred immediately on the shock of his brother's death. In the autumn of the year in which he sustained the affecting loss, he wrote the following serious but animated letter to Mr. Hill.

DEAR JOE,

LETTER XXII.

To JOSEPH HILL, Esq.

Sept. 25, 1770.

I have not done conversing with terrestrial objects, though I should be happy were I able to hold more continual converse with a friend above the skies. He has my heart, but he allows a corner in it for all who show me kindness, and therefore one for you. The storm of '63 made a wreck of the friendships I had contracted in the course of many years, yours excepted, which has survived the tempest.

I thank you for your repeated invitation. Singular thanks are due to you for so singular an instance of your regard. I could not leave Olney unless in a case of necessity, without much inconvenience to myself and others.

In his sequestered life he seems to have been much consoled and entertained by the society of his pious friend, Mr. Newton, in whose religious pursuits he appears to have taken an active part, by the composition of sixty-eight hymns. Mr. Newton wished and expected him to have contributed a much larger number, as he has declared in his preface to that collection of hymns which contains these devotional effusions of Cowper distinguished by the initial letter of his name. The volume composed for the inhabitants of Olney was the joint production of the Divine and the Poet, and intended, as the former expressly says in his Preface, 66 as a monument to perpetuate the remembrance of an

intimate and endeared friendship. With this pleasing view," continues Mr. Newton," I entered upon my part, which would have been smaller than it is, and the book would have appeared much sooner, and in a very different form, if the wise though mysterious Providence of God hath not seen fit to cross my wishes. We had not proceeded far upon our proposed plan, before my dear friend was prevented, by a long and affecting indisposition, from affording me any further assistance." The severe illness of the Poet, to which these expressions relate, began in 1773, and extended beyond the date of the Preface (from which they are quoted), February 15, 1779.

These social labours of the Poet with an examplary man of God, for the purpose of promoting simple piety among the lower classes of the people, must have been delightful, in a high degree, to the benevolent heart of Cowper; and I am persuaded he alludes to his own feelings on this subject in the following passage from his Poem on Conversation.

True bliss, if man may reach it, is compos'd
Of hearts in union mutually disclos'd:

And farewell else, all hope of pure delight!
Those hearts should be reclaim'd, renew'd, upright:
Bad men, profaning friendship's hallowed name,
Form in its stead a covenant of shame:

But souls that carry on a blest exchange

Of joys they meet with in their heavenly range,
And with a fearless confidence make known
The sorrows sympathy esteems its own;
Daily derive increasing light and force

From such communion, in their pleasant course;