The Works of William Cowper. William Cowper

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      With respect to Monsieur le Curé, I think you not quite excusable for suffering such a man to give you any uneasiness at all. The grossness and injustice of his demand ought to be its own antidote. If a robber should miscall you a pitiful fellow for not carrying a purse full of gold about you, would his brutality give you any concern? I suppose not. Why, then, have you been distressed in the present instance?

      Yours,

       W. C.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.[85]

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      Olney, April 8, 1781.

      My dear Friend—Since I commenced author, my letters are even less worth your acceptance than they were before. I shall soon, however, lay down the character, and cease to trouble you with directions to a printer, at least till the summer is over. If I live to see the return of winter, I may, perhaps, assume it again; but my appetite for fame is not keen enough to combat with my love of fine weather, my love of indolence, and my love of gardening employments.

      I send you, by Mr. Old, my works complete, bound in brown paper, and numbered according to the series in which I would have them published. With respect to the poem called "Truth," it is so true, that it can hardly fail of giving offence to unenlightened readers. I think, therefore, that, in order to obviate in some measure those prejudices that will naturally erect their bristles against it, an explanatory preface, such as you (and nobody so well as you) can furnish me with, will have every grace of propriety to recommend it. Or, if you are not averse to the task, and your avocations will allow you to undertake it, and if you think it would be still more proper, I should be glad to be indebted to you for a preface to the whole. I wish, you, however, to consult your own judgment upon the occasion, and to engage in either of these works, or neither, just as your discretion guides you.

      I have written a great deal to-day, which must be my excuse for an abrupt conclusion. Our love attends you both. We are in pretty good health; Mrs. Unwin, indeed, better than usual: and as to me, I ail nothing but the incurable ailment.

      Yours, my dear friend,

       W. C.

      Thanks for the cocoa-nut.

      I send you a cucumber, not of my own raising, and yet raised by me.

      Solve this enigma, dark enough

       To puzzle any brains

       That are not downright puzzle-proof,

       And eat it for your pains.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.[86]

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      Olney, Monday, April 23, 1781.

      My dear Friend—Having not the least doubt of your ability to execute just such a preface as I should wish to see prefixed to my publication, and being convinced that you have no good foundation for those which you yourself entertain upon the subject, I neither withdraw my requisition nor abate one jot of the earnestness with which I made it. I admit the delicacy of the occasion, but am far from apprehending that you will therefore find it difficult to succeed. You can draw a hair-stroke where another man would make a blot as broad as a sixpence.

      I am much obliged to you for the interest you take in the appearance of my poems, and much pleased by the alacrity with which you do it. Your favourable opinion of them affords me a comfortable presage with respect to that of the public; for though I make allowances for your partiality to me and mine, because mine, yet I am sure you would not suffer me unadmonished to add myself to the multitude of insipid rhymers, with whose productions the world is already too much pestered.

      It is worth while to send you a riddle, you make such a variety of guesses, and turn and tumble it about with such an industrious curiosity. The solution of that in question is—let me see; it requires some consideration to explain it, even though I made it. I raised the seed that produced the plant that produced the fruit that produced the seed that produced the fruit I sent you. This latter seed I gave to the gardener of Tyringham, who brought me the cucumber you mention. Thus you see I raised it—that is to say, I raised it virtually by having raised its progenitor; and yet I did not raise it, because the identical seed from which it grew was raised at a distance. You observe I did not speak rashly when I spoke of it as dark enough to pose an Œdipus, and have no need to call your own sagacity in question for falling short of the discovery.

      A report has prevailed at Olney that you are coming in a fortnight; but, taking it for granted that you know best when you shall come, and that you will make us happy in the same knowledge as soon as you are possessed of it yourself, I did not venture to build any sanguine expectations upon it.

      I have at last read the second volume of Mr. ——'s work, and had some hope that I should prevail with myself to read the first likewise. I began his book at the latter end, because the first part of it was engaged when I received the second; but I had not so good an appetite as a soldier of the Guards, who, I was informed when I lived in London, would, for a small matter, eat up a cat alive, beginning at her tail and finishing with her whiskers.

      Yours, ut semper, W. C.

      The period was now arrived, in which Cowper was at length to make his appearance in the avowed character of an author. It is an epoch in British literature worthy of being recorded, because poetry in his hands became the handmaid of morality and religion. Too often has the Muse been prostituted to more ignoble ends. But it is to the praise of Cowper, that he never wrote a line at which modesty might blush. His verse is identified with whatever is pure in conception, chaste in imagery, and moral in its aim. His object was to strengthen, not to enervate; to impart health, not to administer to disease; and to inspire a love for virtue, by exhibiting the deformity of vice. So long as nature shall possess the power to charm, and the interests of solid truth and wisdom, arrayed in the garb of taste, and enforced by nervous language, shall deserve to predominate over seductive imagery, the page of Cowper will demand our admiration, and be read with delight and profit.

      The following letters afford a very pleasing circumstantial account of the manner in which he was induced to venture into the world as a poet.

      We will only add to the information they contain what we learn from the authority of his guardian friend, Mrs. Unwin, that she strongly solicited him, on his recovery from a very long fit of mental dejection, to devote his thoughts to poetry of considerable extent. She suggested to him, at the same time, the first subject of his verse, "The Progress of Error," which the reader will recollect as the second poem in his first volume. The time when that volume was completed, and the motives of its author for giving it to the world, are clearly displayed in an admirable letter to his poetical cousin, Mrs. Cowper. His feelings, on the approach of publication, are described with his usual nobleness of sentiment and simplicity of expression, in reply to a question upon the subject from the anxious young friend to whom he gave the first notice of his intention in the next letter.

TO THE REV. WILLIAM UNWIN.

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      Olney, СКАЧАТЬ