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Here I saw him in the next summer but one after Cowper's visit. His habits appeared to me such as they were long afterwards described by Mrs. Opie those of extreme retirement, of abstemiousness, and of family devotion.
Again, he could fully appreciate Cowper's taste for classical literature; considering how utterly Newton's education had been neglected, it is perfectly marvellous how he managed, under the most unfavourable circumstances, to acquire no contemptible knowledge of the great classical authors.
It was not pleasant to be outbid in his own department, especially by one who was not a communicant, and to be obliged, when he went on a pastoral visit to a house in which Mrs. Butts happened to be, to sit still and hear her, regardless of the minister's presence, conclude a short mystical monologue with Cowper's verse
Is this your room? How jolly!" "There sit there," she commanded. Cowper slid once more. "How jolly to meet again," said Richard. "It seems an age. Cowper's Letters? . . . Bach? . . . Wuthering Heights? . . . Is this where you meditate on the world, and then come out and pose poor politicians with questions? In the intervals of sea-sickness I've thought a lot of our talk.
"...rills that slip Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass, that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of their silent course," was a worthy forerunner of Shelley and Keats. General Characteristics. Cowper's religious fervor was the strongest element in both his life and his writings.
I am not familiar with it now, though I was interested in it when my former friend was alive. Cowper's Apocryphal Gospels." "That sounds like what I want." His thoughts, however reverted with a twinge to the "former friend" by whom she meant, as he knew, the university comrade of her earlier days. He wondered if she talked of him to Phillotson.
It was a beautiful cavern, with its walls and roof inlaid with mother-of-pearl and diamonds. I am sure the ice palace of the Russian Empress, in Cowper's poem, was not a more superb piece of architecture. The thermometer began falling shortly before sunset and we had the bitterest cold night I ever experienced.
It has most the continuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid original, of any, and in the uncommon excellence of the more finished parts goes beyond Fairfax or any of 'em. The metre is fourteen syllables, and capable of all sweetness and grandeur, Cowper's ponderous blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you his own free pace.
A sensitive and depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or oppression is the going out of a divine light.
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