phenomenon at the end of June has occasioned much speculation among the cognoscenti at this place. Some fear to go to bed, expecting an earthquake; some declare that he neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of judgment is at hand." Similar fears prevailed in other places, and to quiet them at Paris, Lalande addressed a letter to one of the journals.* pages. For fourteen years Cowper abode at Olney, rarely quitting the place for a day, but often abroad in the fields and highways around it. Its human species in general do not figure to advantage in his Too much ale, their besetting sin, disgraced Nat. Gee the clerk, and another had to say Amen for him. Spite of the prognosticated trump of doom, there were the usual gatherings on Sunday morning to the taps in Silver End, the St. Giles of the town, as if the cordial might be needed by way of preparation for the crisis. One of Newton's The best account of the fog is given by M. Arago, in his "Scientific Notices of Comets," inserted in the French Annuaire for 1832, replying in the negative to the question, "Were the Dry Fogs of 1783 and 1831 occasioned by the tail of a comet?" Sec. 11, c. 3. "The fog of 1783 commenced nearly on the same day (18th of June) at places very distant from each other, such as Paris, Avignon, Turin, and Padua." (We see from Cowper's letters that it was at Olney on the 13th. The Skaptar Jokul exploded on the 12th, but earthquakes became violent on the 5th and 6th.) "It extended from the northern coast of Africa to Sweden; it was also observed over a great part of North America. "It continued more than a month. "The air, that at least of the lower regions, did not appear to be its vehicle; for at certain points the fog came with a north wind, and at others with east and south winds. "Travellers found it on the highest points of the Alps. The abundant rains which fell in June and July, and the strongest wind, did not dissipate it. "In Languedoc, its density was sometimes such that the sun was not visible in the morning until it was at the height of twelve degrees above the horizon. During the rest of the day appeared red, and could be looked at by the naked eye. "This fog, or smoke, as some meteorologists called it, was accompanied with a disagreeable smell. "The most distinguishing property it had from ordinary fogs, which are generally very damp, was, by all reports, its dryness. "Finally, it is well worthy of remark, the fog of 1783 seemed to be endowed with a kind of phosphorescent virtue, with an inherent light. I find, at least in the narratives of observers, that it shed, even at midnight, a light which they compared to that of the moon at full, and was sufficient to show objects distinctly at 200 metres, above 650 feet. I add, in order to remove all uncertainty regarding the origin of the light, that it was a new moon at the period of the observation." immediate successors tried to put down this Sabbath-breaking by the strong arm of the law, but a row ensued, in which the constable lost clothing and skin, the gentler sex being foremost in the riot. Newton indeed labored not in vain, but public reformation marches slowly. There was no Sunday school in his time. Cowper describes children seven years of age infesting the streets at night with their curses and ribald songs. When Newton's curacy descended to Scott, his influence came not along with it. He was unpopular at Olney, and was burnt in effigy at Pingewick. Scott marrying a drunken fellow and a pregnant lady, the man betraying his brutality in the service, and the church crowded with idlers equally forgetful of decorum, is an incident which sufficiently proclaims the low state of public manners. It might plead, however, the sanction of high example from which it gathered strength. 66 "In this part of the world at least," says Cowper, many of the most profligate characters are the very men to whom the morals, and even the souls, of others are intrusted; and I cannot suppose the diocese of Lincoln, or this part of it in particular, is more unfortunate in that respect than the rest of the kingdom. Here are seven or eight in the neighborhood of Olney who have shaken hands with sobriety, and who would rather suppress the Church were it not for the emoluments annexed, than discourage the sale of strong beer in a single instance." These notices of a rural English locality sixty years ago, to which the counties south of the Tweed then supplied many a parallel, are not without interest, as illustrating the difficulties which the few evangelical clergy of that day had to contend with, as well as the advance which their cause has made among the members of their sacred profession, a result towards which the exhibitions of the "cassock'd huntsman" and the "fiddling priest" contributed. Referring to Cowper's clerical contemporaries affords an opportunity to correct a mistake which reflects dishonor upon one who deserved it not. Speaking of his satires, Mr. Campbell remarks that they were never personal, except in the instance of Occiduus, who was known to mean the Rev. C. Wesley.' "Occiduus is a pastor of renown, When he has prayed and preached the Sabbath down, * Specimens of the British Poets, vii. 358. With wire and catgut he concludes the day, All elbows shake. Look in and you would swear Had summon'd them to serve his golden god; Will not the sickliest sheep of every flock "I have by me a list of names, in the handwriting of the author of these letters, of the persons who engaged in prayer, and it is interesting to observe among them the frequent recurrence of the name of the poet Cowper, from the year when he came to reside at Olney, to the year 1773, when a dark cloud came over his mind, and peculiar views of himself unhappily prevented him from entering a place of worship to the end of his days. So strictly conscientious was this interesting man, that I have frequently seen him sit down at table when others have risen, to implore a blessing, and take his knife and fork in hand, to signify, I presume, that he had no right to pray.”* Upon Newton becoming a metropolitan rector, or, as he facetiously termed his ecclesiastical translation, contracting marriage with a London saint of the name of Molly Woolnoth, the social meeting ceased to Charles Wesley was not the man to have or to sanction Sunday routs and concerts. Martin Madan was the person in question, chaplain at the Lock Hospital, a popular preacher, and musical in his taste, who lost character and fame upon the publication of "Thelyphthora," a treatise in which he appeared as the avowed advocate of polygamy. Cowper's letters contain allusions which completely clear up this point. He speaks of having given a squint at the author of "Thelyphthora" in the "Progress of Error;" and again referring to the Ma-place allowing of the oration. But the redans, Martin and Spencer, he says: "Of the former, I have heard that my Task is his theme in all companies, but that terrible book of his has made me more than half afraid to meddle with him, lest he should tease me for my opinion of it, in which case I should be obliged to execrate it even to his face. I gave him a broad look of disapprobation in my Progress of Error." prosper. his study, the Olney folk turned up their However good a commentator in noses at the rivâ voce expositions of Scott, and preferred hearing one of the lay brethren exercise his gifts, the unconsecrated gular-bred divine maintained his prerogative, and stoutly resisted such an uncanonical proceeding. Newton, aware of the crook in the lot of his successor, acknow "A Theosophic pipe with brother B., Beneath the shadow of his favorite tree, And then how happy I! how cheerful he!" The recent publication of these letters forbids their being widely known, and therefore we give the following characteristic note. "Bucks to Wit. The name Occiduus (western) fitted Ma-yet dan, the Lock Hospital being at the west end of London. One building, (6 a place for social prayer," which two of the "Olney Hymns" commemorate, has entirely disappeared. This was an old untenanted mansion, in which Newton rented a room, and commenced a service of prayer and exposition, in which the frequenters of the meeting united with the church-goers. In a collection of letters recently, for the first time, published (February, 1847), by the Rev. T. P. Bull, of Newport Pagnell, addressed by Newton to his father,* an interesting note occurs referring to this service : Described by Cowper as " a Dissenter, but a liberal one-a man of letters and of genius-a master of a fine imagination, or rather, not master of it. He can be lively without levity, and pensive without dejection. Such a man is Mr. Bull; but-he smokes tobacco. Nothing is perfect!" Playfully he used to address him as Carissima TaurorumMon aimable et très cher ami-and Newton as mon cher Taureau-Dear and Reverend Bull. In the collection of letters referred to above, Newton, as a similarly imperfect being, anticipates a journey from London into Bucks, and then You are required and enjoined to appear personally at our Episcopal seat in Olney, on the present Wednesday, 19th August, to dine with the Rev. Henry Venn (Vicar of Huddersfield), and with us. And hereof you are not to fail. Given at our den-die supra dicto To the Rev. William Bull. JOHN NEWTON. Read to-morrow. · Olney Hymns and Olney Homer! I understand you; when shall I come to my Nil admirari. I find, after all my supposed acquaintance with the human heart, there are windings and depths in it of which I know no more than of the dark unfathomable caves of ocean. When I have puzzled and grieved sufficiently about things which I cannot account for nor remedy, then I try to leave them with the Lord. He alone can make the crooked straight. It is singular indeed-and we may say of this turn, as of all that went before it,' God moves in a mysterious way.' We may perhaps gather from this that Newton, who argued ill to Cowper, in a religious respect, from his intimacy with the Throckmortons, did so likewise from his attention to Homer. Recent Letters, p. 221. * Ibid., p. 57. "The next time (says he) I am young, and begin to preach in a country place, I intend not to do just as I did at Olney. Particularly, I will have all the work to myself in public meetings, except the singing. Our prayer meetings and praying men were, I think, useful for the first | seven years upon the whole; but afterwards great inconveniences ensued."* ledges, in the letters before us, to an inad- | the stream at Olney; in the direction of It is time now to quit the man-made town for the country enduringly pictured in the Task. The few survivors of Cowper's time who made acquaintance with his outward man, are rapidly becoming fewer. Yet securing the services of a gossip who had seen him a hundred times in his walks, Mr. Miller took a peep at his rural haunts, and final residence in Bucks, amid the woodlands of Weston. "The good Squire Cowper (she said), well did she remember him, in his white cap, and his suit of green, turned up with black. She knew the Lady Hesketh too." A kindly lady was the Lady Hesketh; there are few such ladies now-a-days; she used to put coppers into her little velvet bag every time she went out, to make the children she met happy; and both she and Mrs. Unwin were remarkably kind to the poor. The road to Weston-Underwood looks down upon the valley of the Ouse. Were there not water lilies in the river in their season? I asked; and did not Cowper sometimes walk out along its banks? Oh, yes, she replied, and I remember the dog Beau, too, who brought the lily ashore to him. Beau was a smart, petted little creature, with silken ears, and had a great deal of red about him."" The Ouse will remain associated with the name of Cowper, like the Avon with Shakspeare, the Thames with Pope, the Trent with Kirk White, the Duddon with Wordsworth, and the Tweed with Scott. It has nothing of itself to arrest attention-no splash or murmur, no breadth or clearness, and may be said more to creep than flow; but there it is, in the quiet valley, one of the commonest of streams, yet having a high consecration to invite the gazer, received from his communion with its waters whose "eyes drank the rivers with delight." A few touches-"Ouse's silent tide"-its "flags and reeds"-its "sinuous course"-describe all its characteristics. The bridge, with its "wearisome but needful length," in the floods of winter, crosses Recent Letters, p. 132. Mr. Miller sketches the general appearance of Weston, with its remarkable spots which form all that remains of the house of -the few tall walls and gateway columns the Throckmortons-the cottage, small and homely, in which Scott reasoned himself out of Socinianism into Calvinism, and wrote the Force of Truth-and Cowper's residence, into which the tourist does not seem to have sought admission. It would have been readily granted. The two lines are there, in the fair distinct handwriting of the poet, on a panel of the window-shutter in his bed-room, which expresses his feelings on quitting the place for Norfolk: Oh, for what sorrows must I now exchange ye "Farewell, dear scenes, for ever closed to me; ! July 28, 1795." Nothing beyond a temporary absence was then contemplated; but the presentiment was verified, by the separation proving final, and by the deep mental anguish in which nearly five subsequent years were passed. He saw the Ouse for the last time on his journey, by moonlight, from the churchyard of St. Neots, where also the last gleam of cheerfulness lighted up his countenance that marked his life. The Wilderness, the Lime Walk, the Alcove, the Spinnie, the Rustic Bridge, Kilwick's echoing wood, the Peasant's Nest, are all at Weston-sites which had been commemorated before Cowper's removal to the soil. Torn and hollow, covered with it, being within an easy distance of his warts and wens, and showing a scanty former abode. The Lime Walk is the sprinkling of foliage, it answers to the tree most noticeable and unaltered spot-a described by Spenser, Gothic aisle-like avenue of stately trees, with interlacing tops, where lights and shadows" dance upon the grass on a sunny day, when the breezes are astir : "How airy and how light the graceful arch, Re-echoing pious anthems! while beneath Such lines evince the delicacy and truth of "The moonbeam sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves." He set out, in poetry, to describe Nature from herself, not from a copy, as well as to delineate the heart from his own experience; and no man ever more faithfully kept to a purpose. Still clad with reliques of its trophies old, and might have stood for the decayed oak It is quite in character for the author of the "Old Red Sandstone" to geologize, whether tramping over the oolite of North Bucks, or wandering among the ancient granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. Accordingly, from a heap of stones in the street before Cowper's house at Weston, he picked up some broken fossils, a well-marked plagiostoma, and a fragment of a pecten, thinking with a smile of the philippic on the early geologists. "There they had lain as carelessly indifferent to the strictures in the Task as the sun in the central heavens, two centuries before, to the denunciations of the Inquisition. Geology, however, in the days of Cowper, had not attained to the dignity of a science." Even now that it has, the It is somewhat singular that most of world is slow to believe, though trusting to Cowper's productions may be referred to its own wrongheadedness has led to many the suggestions of others. Mrs. Unwin led expensive follies. To Mr. Miller's account him to the Progress of Error, and its kin- of the Earl of Cromarty's attempt to bore dred moral satires; Newton to the Olney for coal in the old red sandstone, far beneath Hymns; Carissima Taurorum to the trans- the true coal-measures, may be added two lations from Madame Guion; Lady Austen enterprises, in which thousands were squanto the Task, John Gilpin, and Homer; dered, to reach it through the oolite of Olwhile an humble suitor, the parish clerk of ney and Northampton, one so late as 1839, Northampton, procured from him mortuary where, if coal occurs at all, it must be at an verses. The noble fragment on the Yard- unapproachable depth. After a day's ramley Oak is an exception. It was never ble in the haunts of Cowper, we find our mentioned to any of his friends, and not traveller ensconced for the night at Olney, known to exist till found among his papers" in a quiet old house, kept by a quiet old after his death, though evidently he had man," with the fading countenance of the girded up his mind to honor the monarch of Duke of York on the sign-board; and there the woods. The tree, said to have been an we must leave him, with the remark that oak in the time of the Conqueror, and to" mine host" remembers his Scotch guest have borne the name of Matilda from his two years ago, though quite as unconscious wife, is of course an object of frequent re- of his quality as of the ichthyolites he has sort, and has suffered from the spoliation of made so famous. its visitors, though protected by an inscrip- A parting word about Cowper. For him tion from its owner, the Marquis of North- the distinction may be claimed of having ampton, deprecating their ravages. It resuscitated the poetry of England from a boasts not the size of the famous oak of state of collapse, inspired it with life and Dorset, the cavity of which, in the time of health, and with Christian life, and sanctithe Commonwealth, was used by an old fied it to the promotion of human happiman for the entertainment of travellers as ness. Though retired from the great world an alehouse, yet the girth of twenty-eight of men, disliking its Babel sounds, and feet five inches belongs to it, a foot above longing for " a lodge in some vast wilder struts about with an air of royalty, or imagines himself pierced by an assassin's dagger, and cries out "murder " in his agony. We advert to this much handled subject, simply for the sake of introducing a somewhat original view of it by Mr. Miller: "It were presumptuous to attempt interpreting the real scope and object of the afflictive dispensaawe; and yet there does seem a key to it. There tion which Cowper could contemplate with such is surely a wondrous sublimity in the lesson which it reads. The assertors of the selfish theory have dared to regard Christianity itself, in its relation to the human mind, as but one of the higher modifications of the self-aggrandizing sentiment. May we not venture to refer them to the grief-worn the stream of Divine truth into the channels of our hero of Olney-the sweet poet who first poured literature, after they had been shut against it for more than a hundred years, and ask them whether it be in the power of sophistry to square his motives with the ignoble conclusions of their philo ness," he lived for his race; and has laid those delusions precisely parallel to that of society under lasting obligations to him. the patient who fancies himself a king, and By verses devoted to the sorrows of the slave, he helped to create that generous sympathy, and form that public opinion, which conquered the reluctant selfishness of senates to assert the natural liberty of universal man, depriving the oppressor of his power, and bidding the oppressed go free. To his righteous castigation of clerical delinquents, a large and tolerated class in his day, the Church of England is in no slight degree indebted for the purification which its pulpits have undergone; while the cause of Christianity owes much to the vigorous exposition of its doctrines, morals, and spirit, to be found in his pages, for its rescue from the heartless mimicry and pantomime with which it had been confounded. In poetry, Cowper is essentially the muse of ordinary life and common scenes. Nothing can surpass the minute accuracy of his drawing, while he never fails to interest us in objects that lie at every man's thresh-sophy?" old, as invested with beauty, and rife with the lessons of practical wisdom. Unlike His terrible conception, expressed in his the elder bards, he neither deals with the last original poem, the Castaway, the tale tricks of Fairy-land, nor with the dread of a shipwrecked mariner perishing solitaricouncils of Pandemonium; and keeps ly in the ocean, in which, as he says, his equally remote from the fictions of mytho- own misery delighted— logy, and the giants of romance. This stay-at-home habitude, charming us with. what he sees and hears within the sweep of per: To trace Its semblance in another's case, a few acres round the homestead, consti- has been finely commented upon by the tutes one of his highest titles to fame, and lady whose verse is at the head of this pais a leading element of his utility. He opens up sources of delight from nature's common phase within reach of the peasant; and teaches him to rejoice in the hedge-row that skirts his garden, and the robin that chirps at his door. Mysterious as was his unhappy mental state, it had no mysterious specialty, more than what belongs to other instances of monomania. That he should refrain from ostensible communion with heaven, was a natural consequence of the view he took of himself, as a doomed exile from its paternal regards, under an irreversible ban of exclusion; and by this fact, with his uncomplaining spirit, we are furnished with a spectacle of sublime submission to a hard, and as he deemed it an inevitable destiny. That he should have entertained such a conviction, which no reasoning could shake, no friendship weaken, so contradicted by the tenor of his life, and by his own expressed views of the Divine mercy and the evangelic plan, must be ranked as one of Deserted! God could separate From his own essence rather: 66 My God, I am forsaken!" It went up from the holy lips CRACOW.-The Emperor of Austria has not only resolved that the University of Cracow shall remain in existence, but that the education shall be more thoroughly grounded and general, and that a larger number of students shall be admitted. His Majesty has appointed Dr. Johann Schindler, Prebendary of Cracow, Curator of the said University. |