But his children are of an age now to spur him to further literary effort; with the opening of the present century he rallies his power for new songs; and thereafter the slowly succeeding issues of the _Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and the _Tales of the Hall_, pave a new way for him into the courts of Fame. He secures another and more valuable living in the South of England (Wiltshire), where the incense of London praises can reach him more directly. One day in 1819 he goes away from his publishers with bills for {238} £3,000[10] in his pocket; must take them home to show them to his boy, John; he loves that boy and other children over much--more, it is to be feared, than he had ever done that mother, the old flame of Aldborough, in respect of whom there had been intimations of incompatibility; hence, perhaps, the interjection of that sixty-mile ride for a snuff of the freedom of the waves. He died at last down in Trowbridge (his new living), a little way southward of Bradford in Wiltshire; and his remains lie in the chancel of the pretty church there. We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, {239} and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines. William Cowper. [Sidenote: Cowper.] The other poet, to whom allusion has been made, living beside him, in that country of England, yet not near him nor known to him, was William Cowper. You know him better: you ought to know him better. Yet he would have managed a church--if a parish had been his--worse than Crabbe did. I fear he would not have managed children so prudently; and if he had ever married, I feel quite sure that his wife would have managed him. Cowper was of an excellent family, being the son[11] of a church rector, and was born at the rectory (now destroyed), which once stood under the wing of the pretty church that, with its new decorations, still dominates the picturesque valley {240} town of Great-Berkhamsted, on the line of the London and Birmingham Railway. He studied at Westminster--being school-fellow with Churchill, the poet, and with Warren Hastings--of whose Trial we have had somewhat to say: afterward he entered a solicitor's office at the Temple, where Thurlow (later, Lord Chancellor) chanced to be clerk at the same time. He had fair amount of money, good prospect of a place under Government--his uncle, Ashley Cowper, being a man of position and influence.