William
Cowper writes to his friend William Unwin on this date, Aug. 14, in 1784:
“I give you
joy of a journey performed without trouble or danger. You have travelled five
hundred miles without having encountered either. Some neighbors of ours about a
fortnight since, made an excursion only to a neighboring village, and brought
home with them fractured skulls and broken limbs, and one of them is dead. For
my own part, I seem pretty much exempted from the dangers of the road.”
No, Cowper’s
dangers were strictly internal. Few writers of his time and place travelled
less, externally. Johnson had his Scotland, Gibbon his Switzerland, Keats his
Italy. In the interior, Cowper’s journeys were unnumbered. Despite lunatic
asylums and botched suicides, he wrote industriously, letters, poems and hymns,
which often read like dispatches from that other world. Temperamentally, he was
a homebody, unsuited for marriage and career, but blessed with a gift for
friendship. In “An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq.”, he writes to another friend:
“Go
fellow!—whither?—turning short about—
Nay. Stay at
home;—you're always going out.”
The stuttered
phrases and abrupt reversals tell the story. Cowper longed for nothing so much
as peace, and it was denied him in this world. Consider the second stanza of his
hymn (or poem – editors can’t make up their minds), “Retirement”:
“The calm
retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer
and praise agree;
And seem by
Thy sweet bounty made
For those
who follow Thee.”
Cowper’s
redeeming literary quality, what keeps his work from succumbing entirely to earnest
piety or despair, is a sense of humor. Sometimes whimsical or satirical,
sometimes wildly Dickensian (as in the passage quoted at the top). Here’s how
Cowper completes the passage:
“—thanks to
that tender interest and concern which the legislature takes in my security!
Having, no doubt, their fear lest so precious a life should determine too soon,
and by some untimely stroke of misadventure, they have made wheels and horses
so expensive, that I am not likely to owe my death to either.”
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