From Olney there had come about in those times--at the wise suggestion of Lady Hesketh--a move over to the near village of Weston, which thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years ago--moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet--I strolled down from Newport Pagnell--to which place I had taken coach from Northampton--following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak" inn, I found next door his old home--its front overgrown with roses--and strolled into his old garden; and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white tasselled night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.] It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was--if not undertaken--most largely {251} wrought upon. The regular occupation involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not "gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far from the "hollow" ships. In the intervals of this important labor--which was only fairly successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as Crabbe gained at a later day--only chance things were written. But some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful issues. That relating to his mother's picture--sent to him by some cousinly hand--a flashing from the embers of his life, as it were, the reader must know; who knows it too well? "Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed With me but roughly since I heard thee last. Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see, {252} The same that oft in childhood solaced me. Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!" But it is a poem from which quotation will no way serve. After the death of Warton, poet Laureate (1790), Lady Hesketh, and other friends were anxious that the Olney poet should succeed to that honor; Southey says, he might have secured it; but Cowper can never, never go up to court for a kissing of the king's hand. And now there are coming fast drearier days and months to these good people of the Weston home. The poet's mind, staggered perhaps by those later Homeric labors, but more likely by the grievous religious doubts which overhang him, loses from time to time its poise; and he goes maundering, or silent, and with no smile for days, into the deserts of melancholy. [Sidenote: Death of Cowper.]