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The next in the order, which I seldom varied from, came Cowper's Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; its solemn measure and gloomy character, as well as the incident it was founded upon, making it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse.
Before Lord Cowper's Commission on the same subject, I said much the same thing over again and realised that Royal Commissions are most valuable for the purpose of shelving pregnant topics. The only good derived from these official inquiries is that the witnesses get their expenses and the Government printers have a lucrative contract.
I lodged there, at the Swan tavern, upon a July night some twenty years gone; and next morning I rambled over between the hedge-rows and across meadows to the little village of Weston, where I lunched at the inn of "Cowper's Oak." The house where the poet had lived with good Mrs. Unwin was only next door, and its front was quite covered over with a clambering rose-tree.
Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos heaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell" In Cowper's poem of "Yardley Oak" there are some beautiful mythological allusions. The former of the two following is to the fable of Castor and Pollux; the latter is more appropriate to our present subject.
This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody," a lament not unworthy of comparison with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases. "The Young American."
The late Lord Chancellor Cowper's strength as an orator lay by no means in his reasonings, for he often hazarded very weak ones.
Cowper's lines, however hackneyed in quotation, are still classic in their application to English homes and their evening accompaniment, Tea.
Long shadows were cast eastward from the tombstones; the horizontal sunlight was making the leaves very light. Philip walked noisily, jerkily, irregularly, like a man conscious of weakness and determined to conquer it. Pete walked behind, so softly that his foot on the gravel was hardly to be heard. The organist was playing Cowper's familiar hymn
The expected outbreak at Agpur had not occurred, and in a short time Cowper's leave would be up and another man would take his place as commander of the escort. Both James Antony's political forebodings and the Rani's prophecies were proving unfounded.
Carlyle's Heroes and Cowper's Letters have been substituted excellent books, the one giving the Indians in rather portentous language very dubious information about Odin, Luther, Rousseau, and other conspicuous people; the other telling them, with a slightly self-conscious simplicity, about a melancholy invalid's neckcloths, hares, dog, and health.
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