Melancholy has been the very demon of genius, the skeleton in the closet of poets and philosophers. Burton composed his "Anatomy of Melancholy" to divert his own depressed spirits.[128] Cowper is another example. He says of himself, "I was struck with such a dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of." He was tenderly attached, it will be remembered, to his cousin Theodora, who returned his love; but disappointment was the lot of both, as her parents, doubtless for good reasons, forbade the union. While the vastly humorous and popular ballad of "John Gilpin" was delighting the Londoners, and was being read to crowded audiences at high prices, the poor unhappy author was confined as a lunatic, and, to use his own words, was "encompassed by the midnight of absolute despair."[129] The poet, like the clown in the ring, when he appears before the public must be all smiles and jests, though concealing perhaps an agony of physical or mental suffering. We know little of the real aspect which the face of Harlequin presents beneath his mask. Be sure he has his sorrows, deep and dark, in spite of the grinning features which he wears. Who does not recall the words which Thackeray makes his old and faithful gold pen utter:-- "I've help'd him to pen many a line for bread; To joke, with sorrow aching in his head; And make your laughter when his own heart bled." Was there ever pleasanter or more genial reading than "Cowper's Familiar Letters," full to the brim with sparkling humor? Yet these were coined from his brain while in a state of hopeless dejection. "I wonder," he writes to Mr. Newton, "that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellect, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if Harlequin should introduce himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." He was one of the most amiable and gifted, but also one of the unhappiest, of the children of genius.