On the death of his father, when the poet had reached the age of twenty-five, he touchingly and expressively tells us that it had never till then occurred to him "that a parson has no fee-simple in the house and glebe he occupies. There was," he says, "neither tree, nor gate, nor stile in all that country to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace." To Huntingdon, where he first made acquaintance with the Ouse, and became an inmate with the Unwins, he clung very lovingly, although he does not rate the charms of the neighbourhood very highly. "My lot is cast in a country where we have neither woods nor commons nor pleasant prospects: all flat and insipid; in the summer adorned only winter covered with a flood." But it was at Olney that Cowper found such scenery as he could appreciate and love. "He does not," in the words of Sir James Mackintosh, "describe the most beautiful scenes in nature; he discovers what is most beautiful in ordinary scenes." [Illustration: 8106] In fact, Cowper saw very few beautiful scenes, but his poetical eye, and his moral heart, detected beauty in the sandy flats of Buckinghamshire." The walk, especially, from the quiet little town to the village of Weston Underwood, he has made classic among English scenes by the description in the first book of the _Task_. Leaving Olney, where, in truth, there is not much to detain us, save the poet's home--the same in outward aspect, at least, as during the twenty years spent by him within its walls,--and the summer-house in the garden where he sat and wrote, while Mrs. Unwin knitted, and Puss, Tiny, and Bess sported upon the grass--we may climb the little eminence above the river, and with an admiration like that of the poet ninety years ago, "dwell upon the scene." "Here is the "distant plough slow moving," and [Illustration: 0107] "Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain Of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o'er, Conducts the eye along his sinuous course Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank, Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms. That screen the herdsman's solitary hut; While far beyond, and overthwart the stream, That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale, The sloping land recedes into the clouds; Displaying on its varied side the grace Of hedgerow beauties numberless, square tower, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells Just undulates upon the listening ear; Groves, heathes and smoking villages remote."