very circumstance that aggravates his distress; therefore he misses her the more, and feels that he can but ill spare her. It is, however, a necessary tax, which all who live long must pay for their longevity, to lose many whom they would be glad to detain (perhaps those in whom all their happiness is centered), and to see them step into the grave before them.

In one respect at least this is a merciful appointment. When life has lost that to which it owed its principal relish, we may ourselves 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 the evening of his long day may be serene and happy.

LETTER XXXVI.
To JOSEPH HILL, Esq.

October 20, 1783. I should not have been thus long silent, had I known with certainty where a letter of mine might find you. Your summer excursions, however, are now at an end, and addressing a line to you in the centre of the busy scene in which you spend your winter, I am pretty sure of my mark.

I see the winter approaching without much concern, though a passionate lover of fine weather, and the pleasant scenes of summer; but the long evenings have their comforts too, and there is hardly to be found upon the earth, I suppose, so snug a creature as an Englishman by his fire-side in the winter. I mean, however, an Englishman that lives in the country, for in London it is not very easy to avoid intrusion. I have two ladies

to read to sometimes more, but never less. At pre sent we are circumnavigating the globe, and I find the old story with which I amused myself some years since, through the great felicity of a memory not very retentive, almost new. I am, however, sadly at a loss for Cook's Voyage: Can you send it? I shall be glad of Forster's too. These together will make the winter pass merrily, and you will much oblige me.

The last letter contains a slight sketch of those happy winter evenings which the Poet has painted so exquisitely in verse. The two ladies whom he mentions as his constant auditors were Mrs. Unwin and Lady Austen. The public, already indebted to the friendly and cheerful spirit of the latter for the pleasant Ballad of John Gilpin, had soon to thank her inspiring benevolence for a work of superior dignity, the very master-piece of Cowper's unbounded imagination!

This lady happened, as an admirer of Milton, to be partial to blank verse, and often solicited her poetical friend to try his powers in that species of composition. After repeated solicitation, he promised her, if she would furnish the subject, to comply with her request. "O," she replied, "you can never be in want of a subject-you can write upon any-write upon this sofa!" The Poet obeyed her command, and from the lively repartee of familiar conversation arose a Poem of many thousand verses, unexampled perhaps both in its origin and its excellence! A Poem of such infinite variety, that it seems to include every subject, and every style, without any dissonance and disorder; and to have flowed, without effort, from inspired philanthropy, eager to impress upon the hearts of all readers whatever may lead them most happily to the full en

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joyment of human life, and to the final attainment of Heaven.

The Task appears to have been composed in the winter of 1784. A circumstance the more remarkable, as winter was, in general, particularly unfavourable to the health of the Poet. In the commencement of the Poem he marks both the season and the year, in the tender address to his companion.

"Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
"Fast lock'd in mine."

If such can be the proper date of this most interesting Poem, it must have been written with inconceivable rapidity, for it was certainly finished very early in November. This appears from the following passage in a letter of the Poet to Mr. Bull, in which he not only mentions the completion of his great work, but gives a particular account of his next production.

"The Task, as you know, is gone to the press; since it went I have been employed in writing another Poem, which I am now transcribing, and which, in a short time, I design shall follow. It is entitled Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools: the business and purpose of it are to censure the want of discipline, and the scandalous inattention to morals, that obtain in them; especially in the largest; and to recommend private tuition as a mode of education preferable on all accounts; to call upon fathers to become tutors to their own sons, where that is practicable; to take home to them a domestic tutor, where it is not; and if neither can be done, to place them under the care of such a man as he to whom I am writing; some rural Parson, whose attention is limited to a few."

The date of this letter (Nov. 8, 1784), and the infor

mation it contains, induce me to imagine that the Task was really begun before the winter of 1784, and that the passage which I have cited, as marking the æra of its composition, was added in the course of a revisal.

The following passages from Cowper's letters to his last mentioned correspondent confirm this conjecture. August 3, 1783" Your sea-side situation, your beautiful prospects, your fine rides, and the sight of the palaces, which you have seen, we have not envied you; but are glad that you have enjoyed them. Why should we envy any man? Is not our green-house a cabinet of perfumes? It is at this moment fronted with carnations and balsams, with mignonette and roses, with jessamine and woodbine, and wants nothing but your pipe to make it truly Arabian;-a wilderness of sweets! The Sofa is ended, but not finished; a paradox which your natural acumen, sharpened by habits of logical attention, will enable you to reconcile in a moment. Do not imagine, however, that I lounge over it-on the contrary, I find it severe exercise to mould and fashion it to my mind!”.

February 22, 1784 "I congratulate you on the thaw-I suppose it is an universal blessing, and probably felt all over Europe. I myself am the better for it, who wanted nothing that might make the frost supportable: what reason, therefore, have they to rejoice who, being in want of all things, were exposed to its utmost rigour?-The ice in my ink, however, is not yet dissolved-It was long before the frost seized it, but at last it prevailed-The Sofa has consequently received little or no addition since—It consists at present of four Books, and part of a fifth: when the sixth is finished, the work is accomplished; but if I may judge by my present inability, that period is at a considerable dis tance."

The year 1784 was a memorable period in the life of the Poet, not only as it witnessed the completion of one extensive work, and the commencement of another, (his Translation of Homer) but as it terminated his intercourse with that highly pleasing and valuable friend whose alacrity of attention and advice had induced him to engage in both.

Belightful and advantageous as his friendship with Lady Austen had proved, he now began to feel that it grew impossible to preserve that triple cord, which his own pure heart had led him to suppose not speedily to be broken. Mrs. Unwin, though by no means destitute of mental accomplishments, was eclipsed by the bril liancy of the Poet's new friend, and naturally became uneasy under the apprehension of being so; for, to a woman of sensibility, what evil can be more afflicting than the fear of losing all mental influence over a man of genius and virtue whom she had been long accustomed to inspirit and to guide?

Cowper perceived the painful necessity of sacrificing a great portion of his present gratifications. He felt that he must relinquish that ancient friend, whom he regarded as a venerable parent, or the new associate, whom he idolized as a sister of a heart and mind peculiarly congenial to his own. His gratitude for past services of unexampled magnitude and weight would not allow him to hesitate, and, with a resolution and delicacy that do the highest honour to his feelings, he wrote a farewell letter to Lady Austen, explaining and lamenting the circumstances that forced him to renounce the society of a friend, whose enchanting talents and kindness had proved so agreeably instrumental to the revival of his spirits, and to the exercise of his fancy.