river Ouse winds round and round amid the low lands, and sighs among its sedges. He seems like a castaway; what he has written has been little--a boy's pastime; what he has purposed has been weak; and I daresay that his uncle Ashley Cowper, and his cousin Theodora, and his fellow-clerk Thurlow, thought they would never hear of him more, until, on some far-off day, a funeral invitation might come. But Cowper was presently domesticated in the home of a Rev. Mr. Unwin--an old gentleman, who has a youngish wife (though eight or ten years Cowper's senior) and a son, who is also a preacher. These take kindly to the invalid; they relish his religious exuberance; they pity his frailties; and then and there begins an intimate friendship between Mrs. Unwin and our poet, which for its purity, its strength, its constancy, is without a parallel, I think, in English literary annals. It was about the year 1765 that he first fell in with Mrs. Unwin, and he was never thereafter separated from her--for any considerable time, counting by days--up to the year of her death in 1796. For the first sixteen years of this exile upon {244} the flats along the Ouse--whether at Huntingdon or at Olney (where they removed after the death of the elder Unwin) there must have been, what most men--whether poets or not--would count a weary and monotonous succession of weeks and days and months. There were few neighbors of culture; no village growth or stir; lands all tamely level; streams all sluggish; industries of the smallest; no shooting--no fishing--no cards--no visitors--no driving; sermon reading in the morning; sermon reading in the evening; walks in the garden; digging in the garden (mild insanity intervening); petting the tame hares; feeding the doves; reading Mistress More; singing hymns; drinking tea; listening for the larks; listening to Mrs. Unwin; drowsing--sleeping--dreaming! Only contrast that dreary trail of days with those passed by Goldsmith, or by Johnson, or by Hume! But good Mrs. Unwin, who is not only kindly, but has some dormant literary tastes, does rouse him to some poetic labors; she does have faith in his talent; and it was in 1782, I think, that his book containing _Table-talk_ and other {245} verse, first appeared, and by its quiet graces and naturalness provoked inquiry in London, and amongst cultured readers everywhere--as to who this "William Cowper of the Inner Temple" might possibly be? The Rev. John Newton of Olney knew, for the poet had assisted him in the preparation of a certain _Olney Hymn Book_, published not long before: and then and thereafter this John Newton---a good-hearted, well-meaning divine of an old-fashioned stamp, was pounding, as occasion served, with the hard hammer of his unblinking Calvinism upon the quivering sensibilities of the distraught poet.