The Collected Works. William Cowper

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СКАЧАТЬ the more cheerfully resign it. I beg you would present him with my most affectionate remembrance, and tell him, if you think fit, how much I wish that the evening of his long day may be serene and happy.

      W. C.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

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      Olney, May 31, 1783.

      We rather rejoice than mourn with you on the occasion of Mrs. C——'s death. In the case of believers, death has lost his sting, not only with respect to those he takes away, but with respect to survivors also. Nature indeed will always suggest some causes of sorrow, when an amiable and Christian friend departs, but the scripture so many more and so much more important reasons to rejoice, that, on such occasions, perhaps more remarkably than on any other, sorrow is turned into joy. The law of our land is affronted if we say the king dies, and insists on it that he only demises. This, which is a fiction where a monarch only is in question, in the case of a Christian is reality and truth. He only lays aside a body which it is his privilege to be encumbered with no longer; and, instead of dying, in that moment he begins to live. But this the world does not understand, therefore the kings of it must go on demising to the end of the chapter.

      W. C.

TO THE REV. WILLIAM BULL.[185]

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      Olney, June 3, 1783.

      My dear Friend—My green-house, fronted with myrtles, and where I hear nothing but the pattering of a fine shower and the sound of distant thunder, wants only the fumes of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful. Tobacco was not known in the golden age. So much the worse for the golden age. This age of iron or lead would be insupportable without it; and, therefore, we may reasonably suppose, that the happiness of those better days would have been much improved by the use of it. We hope that you and your son are perfectly recovered. The season has been most unfavourable to animal life; and I, who am merely animal, have suffered much by it.

      Though I should be glad to write, I write little or nothing. The time for such fruit is not yet come; but I expect it, and I wish for it. I want amusement; and, deprived of that, have nothing to supply the place of it. I send you, however, according to my promise to send you every thing, two stanzas, composed at the request of Lady Austen. She wanted words to a tune she much admired, and I wrote her the following—

      ON PEACE.

      No longer I follow a sound, &c.[186]

      Yours,

       W. C.

TO THE REV. WILLIAM UNWIN.

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      Olney, June 8, 1783.

      My dear William—Our severest winter, commonly called the spring, is now over, and I find myself seated in my favourite recess, the green-house. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at the window, you may suppose I have no interruption to complain of, and that my thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the beauties of the spot are themselves an interruption, my attention being called upon by those very myrtles, by a double row of grass pinks, just beginning to blossom, and by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to consider it, if you please, as no small proof of my regard, that, though you have so many powerful rivals, I disengage myself from them all, and devote this hour entirely to you.

      You are not acquainted with the Rev. Mr. Bull of Newport—perhaps it is as well for you that you are not. You would regret still more than you do, that there are so many miles interposed between us. He spends part of the day with us to-morrow. A dissenter, but a liberal one; a man of letters, and of genius; master of a fine imagination, or rather not master of it—an imagination which, when he finds himself in the company he loves, and can confide in, runs away with him into such fields of speculation, as amuse and enliven every other imagination that has the happiness to be of the party! at other times he has a tender and delicate sort of melancholy in his disposition, not less agreeable in its way. No men are better qualified for companions in such a world as this than men of such a temperament. Every scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one, and the mind that has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of all qualified for the contemplation of either. He can be lively without levity, and pensive without dejection. Such a man is Mr. Bull. But—he smokes tobacco—nothing is perfect——

      Nihil est ab omni

       Parte beatum.

      On the other side I send you a something, a song if you please, composed last Thursday: the incident happened the day before.[187]

      Yours,

       W. C.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

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      Olney, June 13, 1783.

      My dear Friend—I thank you for your Dutch communications. The suffrage of such respectable men must have given you much pleasure, a pleasure only to be exceeded by the consciousness you had before of having published truth, and of having served a good master by doing so.

      I have always regretted that your ecclesiastical history went no further; I never saw a work that I thought more likely to serve the cause of truth, nor history applied to so good a purpose.[188] The facts incontestable, the grand observation upon them all irrefragable, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon. I would give you my reasons for thinking so, if I had not a very urgent one for declining it. You have no ear for such music, whoever may be the performer. What you added, but never printed, is quite equal to what has appeared, which I think might have encouraged you to proceed, though you missed that freedom in writing which you found before. While you were at Olney, this was at least possible; in a state of retirement you had leisure, without which I suppose Paul himself could not have written his epistles. But those days are fled, and every hope of a continuation is fled with them.

      The day of judgment is spoken of not only as a surprise, but a snare, a snare upon all the inhabitants of the earth. A difference indeed will obtain in favour of the godly, which is, that though a snare, a sudden, in some sense an unexpected, and in every sense an awful, event, yet it will find them prepared to meet it. But, the day being thus characterized, a wide field is consequently open to conjecture: some will look for it at one period, and some at another; we shall most of us prove at last to have been mistaken, and if any should prove to have guessed aright, they will reap no advantage, the felicity of their conjecture being incapable of proof, till the day itself shall prove it. My own sentiments upon the subject appear to me perfectly scriptural, though I have no doubt that they differ totally from those of all who have ever thought about it, being however so singular, and of no importance to the happiness of mankind, and being moreover difficult to swallow just in proportion as they are peculiar, I keep them to myself.

      I am and always have been a great observer СКАЧАТЬ