Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/129

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

��His

depression.

��His terrible lines.

��His brother John.

��Although Cow r per had constantly suffered from depression of spirits and had had melancholy fits at school, the first serious outburst of madness was not until his thirty-second year, when on his appointment to be Clerk of the Journals, finding that he would have to appear at the Bar of the House of Lords, he attempted suicide rather than face the ordeal, and wrote, " They whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition is mental poison, may have some idea of the horrors of my situation others can have none."

It was at this time that he wrote those terrible lines :

Hatred and vengeance my eternal portion Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait with impatient readiness to seize my

Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas ; more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy Master! Twice-betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,

Deems the profanest.

John Cowper, his brother, and Martin Madan, his cousin, a strong Calvinist, vainly endeavoured to comfort him, and on the 7th of December, 1763, it became necessary to place him in an asylum at St. Albans, under Dr. Nathaniel Cotton, whose kind and judicious treatment had a most beneficial effect. In the follow- ing July, while reading the third chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, the words of the twenty- fifth verse riveted his attention : " W^hom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God ; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness : that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." " In a moment," says Cowper, " I believed and received the gospel," and his joy was so great that his physician feared lest it might terminate in a fatal frenzy.

The influence of John Newton upon Cowper dates from the 14th of October, 1767, when the poet and Mrs. Unwin went to to s jj?". ence Olney and occupied the house taken for them by Newton. Many have considered that Newton's influence had an ill effect on Cowper ; but I think that careful investigators will find it to have been the reverse, and Cowper's more active life as an unwearied assistant to his friend must have been a beneficial change from the way he had passed his days at Huntingdon, as described in the following letter :

" We breakfast commonly between eight and nine ; till eleven we read either the Scripture or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries ; at eleven we attend divine service, which is performed here twice every day. . . .After dinner to the garden, where, with Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till teatime. If it rains, or is too windy for walking, we

��John New-

�� �