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"I am sensible of the tenderness and affectionate kindness with which you recollect our past intercourse, and express your hopes of my future restoration. I too within the last eight months have had my hopes, though they have been of short duration, cut off like the foam upon the waters. Some previous adjustments, indeed, are necessary before a lasting expectation of comfort can have place in me. There are those persuasions in my mind which either entirely forbid the entrance of hope, or, if it enter, immediately eject it. They are incompatible with any such inmate, and must be turned out themselves before so desirable a guest can possibly have secure possession. This, you say, will be done. It may be, but it is not done yet; nor has a single step in the course of God's dealings with me been taken towards it. If I mend, no creature ever mended so slowly that recovered at last. I am like a slug or snail, that has fallen into a deep well : slug as he is, he performs his descent with an alacrity proportioned to his weight; but he does not crawl up again quite so fast. Mine was a rapid plunge; but my return to daylight, if I am indeed returning, is leisurely enough..

"I can say nothing for myself at present; but this I can venture to foretell, that should the restoration of which my friends assure me obtain, I shall undoubtedly love those who have continued to love me, even in a state of transformation from my former self, much more than ever."

On June 4th, referring to Mr. Greatheed, who had been preaching at the Independent Meeting, he says: "I should have been glad to have been a hearer;

but that privilege is not allowed me yet. Indeed, since I told you that I had hope, I have never ceased to despair; and have repented that I made my boast so soon, more than once." Subsequent experiences of hope that he had were of a still more transient kind. He describes the light that reached him as comparable neither to that of the sun nor to that of the moon. “It is a flash in a dark night, during which the heavens seemed opened only to shut again."

113. Publication of The "Task."-June, 1785.

"The Talk, a Poem, in Six Books. By William Cowper, Efq., 8vo., 45. in Boards. Johnson."-Review, in the New London Magazine.

Meantime his great poem, the "Task," Task," or rather his second volume, of which the "Task" was the principal poem, was rapidly approaching completion. On Tuesday, May 31st, he returned the last proof to Johnson, and in a few days the book was in the hands of the public.

The "Task" has beauties of its own on almost every page, but certain portions far outshine the rest; and we think that most persons will agree that among the very finest must be reckoned the description of the preparations for tea (Book IV.), of the unexpected fall of snow (Book IV.), of the frosty morning, with the fine satirical transition to the Empress of Russia's palace of ice (Book V.), and the winter's walk at noon under the oaks and elms of Weston Park (Book VI., lines 57-117); but of equal beauty are the description

of the walk by the Peasant's Nest and the Alcove in Book I., and the story of Crazy Kate.

The following passage from Book V. (lines 177-188) is also in his best style :—

"Great princes have great playthings. Some have played

At hewing mountains into men, and some

At building human wonders inountain high.
Some have amused the dull, sad years of life,
Life spent in indolence, and therefore sad,
With schemes of monumental fame ; and sought
By pyramids and mausolean pomp,

Short-lived themselves, to immortalize their bones.
Some seek diversion in the tented field,

And make the sorrows of mankind their sport.

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at."

But undoubtedly the noblest lines in the whole poem are those at the end of the Fifth Book, the "Address to the Creator." We can here give We can here give only the last eleven, but the reader would do well to turn to his Cowper" and read carefully all of them :

"

Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word!
From Thee departing, they are lost, and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace.
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man,
His high endeavour and his glad success,
His strength to suffer and his will to serve.
But oh, Thou bounteous Giver of all good!
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown!
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor;
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away."

The "Task" of course has its blemishes.

Portions

of Book III., the "Garden," though as a whole it is scarcely inferior to the other books, are very dull

reading. But it would puzzle a man of ten times. Cowper's genius to throw us into ecstasies over a description of cucumber rearing. A manure heap does not easily lend itself to poetry. Then, again, Cowper's ignorance of history causes him to make blunders. Even in his throw-off he describes the Picts as our ancestors-a mistake, by the by, which he repeats in the letter to Newton, dated February 10, 1784. These, however, are only spots in a sun; as Southey admirably puts it, "Never were intellectual delight and moral instruction and religious feeling more happily blended than in this poem."

Besides the "Task" Cowper's second volume contained "Tirocinium," " John Gilpin," and the fine and manly "Epistle to Joseph Hill."

The title of the principal poem was of course suggested by the incident that gave origin to it. Lady Austen had set him a task, and nothing seemed to him more appropriate than "Task" to call it. He says himself on the subject:-"It is not possible that a book including such a variety of subjects, and in which no particular one is predominant, should find a title adapted to them all." Nor did it appear to him that because he performed more than his task, therefore the "Task " was not a suitable title. "A house would still be a house, though the builder of it should make it ten times as big as he first intended."

"For the same reason," he observes, " none of the inferior titles apply themselves to the contents at large of that book to which they belong. They are, every one of them, taken either from the leading (I should say the introductory) passage of that particular book,.

1

or from that which makes the most conspicuous figure in it. Had I set off with a design to write upon a gridiron, and had I actually written near two hundred lines upon that utensil, as I have upon the Sofa, the gridiron should have been my title. But the Sofa being, as I may say, the starting-post, from which I addressed myself to the long race that I soon conceived a design to run, it acquired a just pre-eminence in my account, and was very worthily advanced to the titular honour it enjoys, its right being at least so far a good one, that no word in the language could pretend a better."

"The Time-piece appears to me (though by some accident the import of that title has escaped you) to have a degree of propriety beyond the most of them. The book to which it belongs is intended to strike the hour that gives notice of approaching judgment; and, dealing pretty largely in the signs of the times, seems to be denominated, as it is, with a sufficient degree of accommodation to the subject.”

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